The Seventh Candidate

The nameless Seventh Candidate helps Edmond Lorz in his war against obscene graffiti on subway posters. Obsessed like his employer by the need for order in a chaotic society, won't the disquieting employee be tempted to go even further by eliminating the scrawlers of those obscenities themselves?In an age of plummeting morals and urban chaos verging on civil war, businessman Edmond Lorz makes a precarious living by removing obscene graffiti from subway advertising posters. It's during a recruitment aptitude test for extra porn-purging staff that a terrorist bomb rips through "Ideal Poster's" grubby headquarters, leaving Lorz and one candidate--the seventh--fighting for life in hospital. Lorz recovers completely, but the strikingly handsome young job-seeker wakens from his coma a blank-faced, unspeaking automaton with total amnesia and a blind obsession with his new employer's clean-up campaign. Adopted by Lorz and his wildly unpredictable secretary, Dorothea--each driven by pity, love and stark fear--the mysterious Seventh Candidate wages a private and manic war on disorder in a subterranean maze of tunnels beneath a city gone mad. ****Howard Waldman's latest novel, set against a backdrop of social disintegration that's almost too close for comfort, swings from lunatic hilarity to heart rending tragedy-- and often the reader may struggle to tell the difference in a story with more twists and turns than a subway map