“Killing Eistein” by Morris Hoffman

Killing Einstein

Morris Hoffman
Resource Publications (2026)
ISBN: 979-8385267781
Reviewed by Paul Knobloch for Reader Views (03/2026)

Morris Hoffman’s Killing Einstein is a historical espionage novel with a dryly comic intellectual and philosophical core. At its heart is protagonist and narrator Charlie Richards, a former FBI agent who recalls a period during which he surveilled and protected both Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. As the intrigue develops, we begin to see that the novel, in a very sophisticated way, transforms surveillance itself into a sort of philosophical inquiry.

The novel opens during an actual assassination attempt in Princeton, highlighting the fact that Einstein’s life is in danger. The assassination team is later identified as Nazi, and Charlie is originally brought in to surveil Einstein and famed mathematician Kurt Gödel. They suspect Einstein and Gödel are up to something:

My control, who told me the Bureau had restarted security surveillance on Einstein right after Pearl Harbor, also told me that at the beginning Gödel would just walk to Einstein’s house, and then they’d stroll down through the small graduate campus and through Springdale Golf Course to Fuld Hall. But it appeared they soon tired of this same walk, so they began to meet at different locations and to take different routes. This in fact was something that had gotten up DBS’s snout.

Actually, nothing nefarious is taking place between the two scientific giants, and in fact, Charlie is discovered by the pair and develops a friendly relationship with the two men. Einstein takes the time to really explain Gödel’s concept of incompleteness, which has a profound impact on Charlie, who remarks that “…the most pristine of all truths—mathematical ones—are larger than their proofs. That proof can never fully capture truth.”

Quite a reflection for someone working as a spy.

Charlie becomes very attached to the two older scientists, and in fact, at one point, he even starts arranging his reports to ensure that neither Albert nor Kurt ever becomes a real suspect, highlighting Einstein’s rant against Stalin and the Nazis:

This giant happiness machine is now turned to the goal of ending this war. Its massive capacity will do just that. It is only a matter of time. And when it shatters Nazism, perhaps it can shatter communism along with it.

Unfortunately, that assassination attempt does materialize. This time, Charlie is able to save both Einstein and Gödel. However, we also learn some rather unsettling news about Charlie’s allegiances, which puts the ending of the novel in question and really ramps up the stakes.

As suggested earlier, what I really loved was Charlie’s transformation from an FBI spook into a navel-gazing philosopher asking the big questions in the deep end of the pool. He is learning what it means to be a cog in a bigger structure, and he is learning to demand clarity in his search for the truth. Here we have the man assigned to get to the bottom of things, and he is hiding the biggest secret: he is both watcher and watched, the loyal friend and the traitor, inside and outside the system at once.

I’ll leave Charlie’s final secret for the reader to uncover, but it’s clear that he has become emblematic of Gödel’s paradox: a figure who cannot be fully explained within the system that produced him. In any case, Killing Einstein by Morris Hoffman manages to be more than just a spy novel. It rather takes us deep into philosophical and ontological territory, asking just the kinds of questions that Einstein and Gödel would want us to ask ourselves.