NEW YORK Business writers Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera are collaborating on a critical take of the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic. Portfolio, a Penguin Random House imprint, announced Wednesday that the two had reached an agreement for a news-breaking, character-driven narrative revealing the forces that rendered critical American institutions ill-equipped to cope with the deadliest pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu and the economic consequences of that failure.The title and release date have not yet been determined. More than 100,000 people already have died in this country from the virus. McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and co-author of the Enron book The Smartest Guys in the Room. Nocera is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and co-author of Indentured, about the NCAA. He and McLean previously worked together on All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, about the 2008 market crash.