Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2019 April 17 • Wednesday

Edmund Naughton's The Maximum Game is a great page-turner. It's short and lean at 158 pages and carries no excess baggage.

This isn't an action story but a procedural. Howard DeWitt is a World War I veteran and a widower who's been running a hotel in Paris for decades.

He's conservative, right wing, quiet and racist: "His only problem was with blacks. He did not like to admit them, and he let them in silently only because he did not care to be criticized by his French neighbors".

The book takes place in the real world of the Watergate era. DeWitt's character is important because he's the type of person one might expect to be sympathetic to Nixon.

But he thinks that Nixon—whose name never appears in this novel—is a disgrace and is destroying both the United States and its constitution.

Not given to doing much of anything about anything, certainly not somebody who messes around in politics, DeWitt does mention that he knows it would be possible to assassinate the American president.

A consortium of wealthy businessmen are interested in doing just that and hire a British recruiter to find somebody for the job.

After some diverting interviews with German and Irish candidates, DeWitt is interviewed. He's an old man, no record, an American citizen who wouldn't need a visa to enter the country. He's also an expert big-game hunter, a crack shot who can expertly take down moving targets at long distances.

And he's interested. In fact, he'll do it just for expenses.

Of course, there is one slight problem: he's just started having heart attacks, something only he and his doctor know. He's supposed to avoid excitement. And no more safaris, no more hunting.

But maybe just one more...?