Ned’s Law

When Ned Plunkett's brilliant brother John dies suddenly, he inherits everything. The house. The lab. The equipment. And seventeen patents on technologies that are, in John's own words, not quite ready yet.

Ned is not a scientist. Ned has never been a scientist. But Ned has been told his entire life by everyone who loves him that he has a gift, a natural instinct, a practical genius that formal qualifications could never measure. And John always said he believed in him. It says so right there in the will.

So when Ned finds a booth in the corner of the lab with three letters stencilled on the side, he does what any reasonable person would do. He decides he knows exactly what it is. He decides he knows exactly how to use it. And he gets in.

What follows is the story of one man's absolute and total refusal to be discouraged. By the results. By the neighbours. By the lawyers. By the physics. By the growing list of things that have gone catastrophically wrong and the even longer list of things that are about to.

Ned Plunkett is not a genius. But he is something rarer and considerably more dangerous — a man of complete and unshakeable conviction, armed with equipment he doesn't understand, in a laboratory full of things that are almost finished, surrounded by people who can see exactly what is coming.

Ned cannot see it coming.

Ned never sees it coming.

Ned's Law is a comedy of catastrophic confidence, brotherly love, and the spectacular gap between what we believe about ourselves and what the universe has to say about it.