INTERFERENCE

Parks unfolds a twisty tale about the kidnapping of a Dartmouth physicist whose recondite research has already been stalled by a mysterious malady.

The tobacco mosaic virus, the focus of professor Matt Bronik’s work in quantum interference—the big-picture question of whether “life can go quantum” because scientists can replicate small-scale quantum leaps on unsettlingly larger and larger scales—seems to be affecting him personally. Twice now he’s suddenly blacked out, gone into unexplained comas, and awoken with monster headaches. Has the virus been interfering with him so that his identity has been lost in the universe or merged with his surroundings—for example, with Sheena Aiyagari, the postdoctoral student who tells Detective Emmett Webster that her own mind seems to be merging with Matt’s? Beppe Valentino, his department chair, is worried, and Brigid Bronik, his wife, is frantic. When Matt is felled by a third attack, he’s bundled off to the hospital once more in a grim routine, but this time the ambulance never arrives there, and two of its three staffers are soon found shot dead. A demand for $5 million comes not to Brigid or the Dartmouth lab but to bored billionaire alum Sean Plottner, who’s been trying to get Matt to ditch his job and come work for him. As Webster and Plottner work at cross-purposes to rescue Matt, or to ensure or at least determine that he’s safe, Parks races toward a climax that mercifully leaves the game-changing, larger-than-life questions he’s raised behind.

If it never lives up to its brainy premise, Parks’ suspenseful novel will beguile, entrance, and fool the sharpest readers.