The Stars Turned Inside Out
A Novel
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- $279.00
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- $279.00
Descripción editorial
A Wall Street Journal Best Mystery of 2024
“Many and wondrous are the charms of this witty, suspenseful, and enchanting book.” —The Wall Street Journal
The discovery of a suspicious death at a famous Swiss physics laboratory sparks a mystery that merges science, philosophy, and the high-stakes race to unlock the fundamental nature of our universe in this thrilling new novel from the Edgar Award–nominated author of the “hugely entertaining” (The Wall Street Journal) The Last Equation of Isaac Severy.
Deep beneath the ground outside of Geneva, where CERN’s Large Hadron Collider smashes subatomic particles at breathtaking speeds, a startling discovery is made when the tunnel is down for maintenance: the body of Howard Anderby, a brilliant and recently arrived young physicist, who appears to have been irradiated by the collider. But security shows no evidence of him entering the tunnel, and for all of the lab’s funding, its video surveillance is sorely lacking.
Eager to keep the death under wraps until more is known, CERN brings in private investigator Sabine Leroux, who has her own ties to the lab’s administration—and more than a passing interest in particle physics. Meanwhile, Howard’s colleague and budding love interest Eve, shattered by his death, determines to reconcile what she knew of Howard with his gruesome fate, wondering if she could have done something to stop it.
As Sabine digs into petty academic rivalries and personal secrets, an escalating international physics arms race heightens tensions and fuels speculation of a mole at the lab—throwing into question loyalties and revealing what sort of knowledge may be worth killing for.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
