December 1, 2023
A physicist is found dead from radiation poisoning at high-tech, high-profile CERN, in a nuclear-accelerator tunnel that's been closed down for maintenance. Seeking to avoid bad publicity on the eve of renewing funding from the many European entities that support the research center, CERN's head calls in a friend, a private investigator who can dig around without creating a stir. But soon there's another death, equally exotic: a scientist has drowned in the xenon tank of purified water used to hunt for evidence of dark matter. There's evidence also of commercial espionage; data is leaking to China, which is starting its own similar program. Is someone at CERN trying to cover their tracks by killing off coworkers? Jacobs (The Last Equation of Isaac Severy) assembles all the ingredients for a distinctly different murder mystery, but it doesn't quite gel. The talk about science is interesting, but the characters don't come alive, there isn't much ambience, and the plot moves ahead mechanically. VERDICT Readers who like mixing science and detection may find this book appealing, but it's a mixed bag.--David Keymer
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January 22, 2024
Jacobs (The Last Equation of Isaac Severy) follows up her acclaimed debut with an engrossing whodunit revolving around Geneva’s Large Hadron Collider. After arriving for work one morning, CERN engineer Claude Touschard discovers the dead body of precocious young physicist Howard Anderby in one of the LHC’s tunnels. While it appears Anderby has been killed by radiation exposure, there’s no evidence the collider was turned on the night before, nor that anybody was in it. To keep the death from becoming public, CERN hires well-respected PI Sabine Leroux to investigate. As she speaks with Anderby’s colleagues, Sabine turns up copious evidence of professional rivalries and resentments, as well as Anderby’s potential involvement in a “geeky arms race” with the Chinese that may have put a target on his back. Meanwhile, researcher Eve Marsh, who harbored a crush on Anderby, frets about her recently published anonymous article considering whether particle physics can combat catastrophic climate change, which was based on her unauthorized use of the lab’s resources. Jacobs bestows even minor characters with such convincing motives that the plot’s momentum never slows, no matter how complex things get. Golden age mystery fans will love this. Agent: Lisa Bankoff, Bankoff Collaborative.
February 1, 2024
Jacobs (The Last Equation of Isaac Severy, 2018) elevates the death-in-the-workplace trope to staggering heights in this science-based thriller that fuses physics and philosophy in mind-bending ways. The CERN Large Hadron Collider straddles the Swiss-France border, its campus populated by world-renowned physicists whose egos are as large as the particle-bending behemoth located deep beneath the earth's surface. When its newest colleague, Dr. Howard Anderby, dies of radiation poisoning in a remote tunnel near the Machine, as it is colloquially called, an internal investigation grapples with the questions of whether the death was an accident, suicide, or murder. But when a second physicist drowns in another of the lab's experimental areas, CERN's administrators and security forces know they're dealing with serial murders. Now the debate shifts to who and why. As her high-minded cast of characters seeks the answers, Jacobs delves into subjects as deep as the nature of the universe and the space-time continuum and as quotidian as romantic love and professional jealousy, giving careful readers much to contemplate.
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