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twopoint718's review
1.0
I know quite a bit about Fermilab, and so a lot of the settings were a bit hard to swallow for me.
buildhergender's review
4.0
My first Kevin J Anderson book in this long reading slog. I enjoyed it. Spoilers ahead.
Characters
Dr. Georg Dumenco: A physicist who is studying the basic building blocks of the world. He has developed a way of generating a large amount of antimatter. He came from Russia to America. An all around nice guy. He is also the living murder victim in this book.
Craig Kreident: The hero of the series, which I did not know this book was part of. He works for the FBI and is used when the cases involve technology. He just came back from helping Russia where he helped them prevent WWIII or something, I would have to read the previous book to know.
Patrice LeCroix: Don't call her Trish. She was an old flame of Craig. She works for a group of doctors who try to bring to public attention the horrors of nuclear energy. Currently working at Fermilab.
Paige Mitchell: Another former flame of Craig. She works in public relations. She also works at Fermilab.
Ben Goldfarb: Craig's partner, FBI not the other kind. His main job in this book is to get shot and then lay in a bed.
Nicholas Bretti: Dumenco's graduate student. A bit of a racist and not the smartest physicists out there.
So the book starts with Georg Dumenco working in a shunt tube for a large particle accelerator. He has developed a process that will create as of unheard of amounts of antimatter. So much, maybe even enough to fill a thimble which if you knew physics like Dumenco you would get excited about that amount. He knows the process will work because he did it before back in the bad old days of the Cold War. He can not tell anyone this because of promises and such but he knows the process will work. However it isn't working.
Now have you ever had a coworker who decides the safety rules do not apply to them, like maybe they will put the ladder on top of a stack of chairs to reach the highest shelf? Dumenco is one of them. While the particle accelerator is running no one is supposed to be in the shunt tube as this is where all the matter, antimatter quarks and other small sciency things go if there is an issue. Dumenco figures there will be no issue and he's working in the room. Things go wrong he is exposed to a lot of radiation and somewhere else on the accelerator there is an explosion.
Instead of becoming the next blockbuster super hero Dumenco becomes dying man. Based on the amount of radiation he was exposed to he calculates he has less than a week to live. His doctor, who specializes in radiation exposure, is Patrice Mitchell. Dumenco convinces her that the exposure was no accident and that he was murdered.
She calls Craig and he comes down for old times sake, he brings Ben Goldfarb with him because he knew at some point a human bullet sponge would be good. Craig is not convinced but he agrees to look into the situation. For the first day he finds nothing. However, the odds of this being foul play increases greatly when Ben walks into the wrong particle accelerator shed at the wrong time and gets shot.
Now with a shot partner, his former lover Trish and his former former lover Paige and a talking murder victim he starts to take the threat more seriously. But the issue is that no one really wants to help him. Dumenco refuses to talk about his past. Trish is somewhat tight lipped about the man she interrupted who was trying to help Dumenco die faster than the carton of milk in his fridge. And his partner who got a clear look at the killer before he was shot is in a coma.
He starts to look into the explosion that happened seconds after Dumenco was exposed. The weird thing about it, is there is no explosive residue, and nothing should have been in the particle accelerator shed that blew up.
Eventually the investigation falls on Nicholas Bretti, who is supposed to be at his parents on vacation for the week fishing. However, his parents claim he never told them he was coming and was not there. And the question of the hour is, where is Nicholas.
Nicholas is in India. He has gotten sick of being an underpaid graduate student for the last nine years. He knows he's not the best at physics but he figures his boss should have helped him finish his thesis paper instead of making him work. Somehow he was contacted by a diplomat from India who offered him a lot of money to give them antimatter. They tell Nicholas that the antimatter is for a medical treatment and it has to be bought secretly for reasons. Nicholas buys this and set up a bunch of antimatter traps on the shunt stations throughout the particle accelerator. These are the reason Dumenco is not getting the results he expects. The antimatter is being created but the traps are capturing it before it can be measured. One of the traps was in the particle accelerator shed that exploded. This leaves Nicholas with a lot less antimatter than he expected and his Indian payers are not happy. Nicholas is sent back to America to bring back more. It's a good thing that he has set up another antimatter trap and this one should be full of the mother lode of antimatter.
Back in America the man who tried to smother Dumenco escapes from the FBI a second time, and then almost a third time before being shot. Trish mentions that she had recognized him as a volunteer from her organization and this is why she had been tight lipped. Dumenco insinuates that the dead man is from Russia, a hired thug, and that there is no way he could have caused the accident/murder.
We learn that Dumenco and his boss are up for the Noble prize. He for his work and his boss for a antimatter holder. Dumenco states that he doesn't like the holder and uses the older type because back in Russia he had independently developed the same type of holder and found it inherently unstable. Which is a bad thing because when even a few atoms of antimatter touch regular matter it causes a large explosion.
With a leap of logic Craig realizes that the reason for Dumenco's experiment failures, the explosion, and the missing Grad student are all tied together. The explosion which had been thought of the cause of the accident was actually caused by the accident when that shunt had received the same amount of antimatter that Dumenco received. This caused the holder to overload and create a small nuclear explosion.
After a long ass flight back to America Nicholas is making the rounds of the accelerator grabbing his traps. He manages to escape from one of the FBI agents, but he is pretty sure his face was seen, and he was unable to shoot him like he had the previous one. This combined with the fact that he learned the antimatter he was stealing was not for Medical purposes but instead to make nuclear bombs even more nuclearly causes Nicholas to get desperate because he knows once he leaves he will never be able to return to America. (And here is where he give mini racist rants about how bad and dirty India is.)
Grabbing the mother lode he leaves enough of the material in the trap to use as a booby trap. Craig and his new partner, way to go with the mourning the old partner there Craig, set off the trap. He survives. Let me reiterate he survives the mini nuke and he doesn't even have an old fridge to hide in. Then he survives a prairie fire set off by Nicholas. However he is unable to stop Nicholas from leaving the property and Craig ends up in the O'Hara airport with an unstable antimatter transporter that has enough potential to blow up all of the terminal.
Craig manages to stop both Nicholas and his diplomatic handler. The antimatter is returned and Dumenco's boss comes into the hospital room to tell Dumenco that the Nobel prize committee has awarded Dumenco the prize, in addition once the traps were removed the antimatter creation procedure now worked as Dumenco had predicted. He then apologizes saying he was the one who caused the accident. He just wanted to keep Dumenco from succeeding until the Nobel prize was awarded because it would make the likely hood of his particle holder winning better. He did not know that Dumenco was in the shunt room and so it was not homicide but in truth an accident.
Dumenco dies happy in knowing he won and that his theory has been proven right. We find that the boss had lied about Dumenco winning but not about the accident. He is arrested and Craig is given a promotion and transfer.
Both he and his now non former lover Paige are going to be put in charge of an interdepartmental agency in charge of high technology cases. The book sets this up as the beginning of the rest of the series that I am hotly looking forward to reading. So far since this book's publication in 1998 there have been 0 books written to the series, sigh.
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