The Global War on Morris — Steve Israel

A witty political satire ripped from the headlines and written by Congressman Steve Israel, who's met the characters, heard the conversations, and seen the plot twists firsthand.

Meet Morris Feldstein, a pharmaceutical salesman living and working in western Long Island who loves the Mets, loves his wife Rona, and loves things just the way they are. He doesn't enjoy the news; he doesn't like to argue. Rona may want to change the world; Morris wants the world to leave him alone. Morris does not make waves.

But one day Morris is seduced by a lonely, lovesick receptionist at one of the doctors' offices along his sales route, and in a moment of weakness charges a non-business expense to his company credit card. No big deal, you might think. Easy mistake. But the government's top-secret surveillance program, anchored by a giant, complex supercomputer known as NICK, thinks differently. Eventually NICK begins to thread together the largely disparate and tenuously connected strands of Morris's life -- his friends, family, friends' friends, his traffic violations, his daughter's political leanings, his wife's new patients, and even his failed romantic endeavors -- and Morris becomes the US government's new public enemy number one.

A hilarious, debut novel from a charismatic author, The Global War on Morris toes the line between recent breaking headlines and a future that is not that difficult to imagine.