Michael Beres The President’s Nemesis

The President's Nemesis

Michael Beres

Medallion, July 2006, $24.95, 382 pp.

ISBN 1932815733

Stanley Johnson has had a very traumatic life. First his son was kidnapped and although he kept hoping he was still alive, his body was found four months later. A year after that, his wife, overcome by grief, committed suicide leaving him all alone. He was then forced into an early retirement because funds for his lab where he worked were cut off. The presidential election is coming up in a few months but Stanley is neither interested in who wins whether it is the incumbent President Montgomery or his opponent Rose Adams Haney.

What catches his interest is the car that comes three nights in a row by the dumpster outside his apartment. On the third night he goes down to the dumpster after the vehicle left to pick up what someone left behind, a child's head. Strange things start happening to Stanley including getting piles of pornography through the mail, two men who he doesn't know want to spend time with him and finally he also sleepwalks and has nightmares. When the president makes an impromptu stop through his complex, he is by the window with a broom in his hands. The Secret Service takes Stanley into custody and soon learns that he is in the middle of a conspiracy that could determine the winner of the presidential election.

THE PRESIDENT'S NEMESIS is an excellent thriller that is so convoluted that readers have no idea what is going on until two thirds through the book, but are hooked from the first bag drop. Stanley is the average American who doesn't know there are malignant forces surrounding him that want to bring him down. Michael Beres has written a work that is chilling and frightening because the protagonist is a good man who suffered so much that he deserves only the best life has to offer instead of the traumatic incidents he doesn't understand or knows who orchestrates them.

Harriet Klausner