The Near Miss
Dale Merritt has spent thirty-one years perfecting the exact moment your body leans forward two inches.
He designs the math inside slot machines. He is the best in the country at it. In an industrial park south of Reno, at a desk facing the Sierra, he decides how often the third reel will stop one notch short of the jackpot - the near miss - and he adjusts it, four hundredths of a percent at a time, before lunch.
Then he meets Carol Nunes.
She is sixty-three, a retired nurse, funny in the way of a woman who has spent forty years at the foot of beds, and impossible to lie to. Four years ago her son drove off Highway 395 on a clear afternoon with no alcohol in him, no drugs, and no explanation. She has one question. It has no answer. It never will.
And on Tuesdays, at twenty past two, she sits down at a machine Dale built.
The Near Miss is a novel about the kindest room in America and what it costs to sit in it - about an industry that is honest all the way down, staffed by decent people, audited, legal, and utterly indefensible. There is no villain. There is no rescue. There is a man who understands exactly how the thing works, a woman it is holding, and the discovery that understanding is not a mechanism.
It is also, in places, very funny - which is the cruelest thing about it.
From the author of The Vendor of Inevitable Things and The Older Night.
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