The Intern: Chasing Murderers, Hookers, and Senators Across DC Wasn’t In The Job Description by Dale Wiley, published by Vesuvian Books, 2016.
The Intern is an entertaining novel, a novel that employs all the elements and devices we associate with its genre, the conspiracy-thriller. Trent Norris, the first-person narrator, main character is, just as the title suggests, an intern, an intern at the NEA, the National Endowment for the Arts, which he irreverently describes as “the artsy, standard-bearer of the Apocalypse, the dirty-minded, potty-mouthed, slightly fruity one. A lightning rod to the closed-minded and a place for lovers of the perverse.” But, of course, as an intern he is a minor player in the apocalypse, a gofer who files paperwork, sits in on meetings, ghost writes reports, and answers phones. In fact, it’s while covering the phone for the secretary to the chief financial officer that he gets indirectly involved with a conspiracy that involves the guy whose phone he’s answering and a couple of other chief financial types at foundations. He picks up the phone, a private-line he was not supposed to answer, and is told about something that was going to occur that afternoon. Later he realizes that the mysterious thing being discussed was the killing of a senator. His involvement comes about through the message he left, as a conscientious intern would, about the call; at the time, he thought that the vague thing being discussed was connected to an arts program. After that, a long and involved series of events take place. Trent ends up being chased by the conspirators and the police, who think that he was the assassin. In a matter of a few hours he goes from lowly unpaid intern to public-enemy number one.