The Reading

From the jacket

Robert Averell runs the division that eleven years of a single government contract built. He is celebrated, certain, and humble in all the ways that photograph well. When he installs a decision-traceability system, he sells it to his board as a weapon: proof, in writing, that his people can be trusted. Then the contract is lost, and the system begins, quietly and impartially, to do the only thing it was built to do. It keeps the record.

And the record, read honestly, tells a different story than the one Robert has told about himself for thirty years.

Stripped of his authority, he is taught, slowly, by three unlikely instruments who keep no books on him at all: a waitress who knows his name better than he knows hers, a college janitor who reads a room by watching which walls people come back for, and an old scent hound trained, long ago, to turn against his own nature at the sound of a single word.

The system can be installed in a quarter.The man takes considerably longer.