In an age of plummeting morals and urban chaos verging on civil war, businessman Edmond Lorz makes a precarious living by removing obscene graffiti from underground railway advertising hoardings. It's during a recruitment aptitude test for extra porn-purging staff that a terrorist bomb rips through Ideal Poster's grubby headquarters, leaving Lorz and one candidate - the seventh - fighting for life in hospital. Lorz recovers completely, but the strikingly handsome young job-seeker wakens from his coma a blank-faced, unspeaking automaton with total amnesia and a blind obsession with his new employer's clean-up campaign. Adopted by Lorz and his wildly unpredictable secretary, Dorothea - each driven by pity, love and stark fear - the mysterious Seventh Candidate wages a private and manic war on disorder in a subterranean maze of tunnels beneath a city gone mad. Howard Waldman's latest novel, set against a backdrop of social disintegration that's almost too close for comfort, swings from lunatic hilarity to heartrending tragedy . and often the reader may struggle to tell the difference in a story with more twists and turns than a subway map.