Occasion ... for Disaster

About the book

FBI agent Kenneth Malone is asked to investigate failures that are spreading through government and other institutions. Each mistake can look ordinary in isolation, but their accumulation suggests a problem too systematic to dismiss and too strange to explain through familiar suspects. Malone's experience with unusual mental abilities makes him a plausible investigator, though it does little to simplify his conversations with anxious officials. The inquiry mixes comic exchanges, bureaucratic self-protection, and speculation about minds capable of influencing events beyond conventional detection. Published under the joint pen name Mark Phillips, this is the serial version of the story later issued as Supermind. Its mystery asks how one can identify responsibility when the visible actors may only be the occasions of failure.

• Hidden influence
• Bureaucracy
• Psychic investigation

Why read it

Read it for a comic procedural in which ordinary incompetence becomes evidence of something potentially much larger.

English serial version published as Occasion ... for Disaster