Paranoid

 

Tom Jaglom and Amy Elwell are in love. They’re nineteen years old, sophomores at NYU. It’s an especially glamorous swirl for Amy because along with being rich and smart and handsome, Tom also happens to be the son of the President of the United States. They spend Christmas at the Nantucket compound, she whistles Mozart’s 40th along with the President (they both have perfect pitch); she opens scallops with the First Lady.

            Everything seems perfect; then everything goes wrong.

            Air Force One crashes on New Year’s Eve. The First Lady is killed, the President barely survives. After months of operations and physical therapy, Tom is finally allowed to visit him in the hospital. And in one instant Tom knows absolutely, as only a son could know it, that his father has been replaced by an impostor. It sounds insane. He has no idea who did it, or how they did it, or why. But the switch is part of some terrible coup d’etat and he’s the only one who can stop it. Well, he and Amy, if he can convince her; and his Dad’s old pal Jake Gritzky, a paranoid ex-Green Beret  who believes the CIA invented the AIDS virus. Tom can also count on his father’s best friend, journalist Jim Gramble -- if he can find the man.  Jim has gone underground in fear for his life, after an investigative article  that connected the highest levels of government with organized crime. Jim may be the only man alive who knows what’s really going on. It’s a secret that reaches all the way back to the childhood he shared with the President, and the young Mafioso who befriended them both in high school.

The struggle comes to a climax on Nantucket Island, during the Daffodil Day celebration, as Tom stakes everything on his desperate plan to kill the impostor.

The dark question at the center of all the chases and escapes: is Tom’s far-fetched story in fact a  delusion? Is he a paranoid schizophrenic trying to assassinate the President? Or is he an authentic hero, fighting a diabolical conspiracy? Or both?

After hearing a few bars of music whistled in the Rose Garden,  during a televised Presidential interview, Amy knows the answer, and at the ultimate moment, in a quiet office in the eye of the storm of violence Tom has created, she will hold the fate of the country in her hands.

From the board rooms where mobsters cut deals with politicians to the top security mental hospitals where radicals are “cured” of subversive tendencies; from a lavish sea-side estate to a humble inner city doctor’s office, from the horror of a first killing to the joys of a first romance, this is a novel about greed and corruption, about the modern American devils and the deals we make with them; but more importantly it’s about the imperishable ties of love and family that hold us together and redeem our lives.