THE EINSTEIN PAPERS

The coauthor with Clive Cussler of The Sea Hunters (1996) and Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt Revealed (not reviewed) debuts with his first solo adventure novel. Federal agent John Taft, something of a James Bond/Dirk Pitt superman, is searching for Einstein’s missing formula for the Unified Field Theory. As it happens, a few days before Hiroshima was A-bombed, Einstein actually (in this story) solved the theory. But when the bomb was dropped, he chose to withhold the formula from his fellow scientists and instead entered it (T, E, S, something, A) into the star chart aboard his sailboat Windforce. Ten years later he died, and the Windforce was on its way to a junkyard when a large ship accidentally rammed it. The boat sank. Now the Chinese are hot on the trail of the missing formula: with it they could make a golf-ball’sized bomb that would make the Australian continent disappear, or a car-sized bomb that would blow up the planet—a neato device for blackmail. Taft first rescues a kidnaped scientist from China, then goes out to find the remains of the Windforce on the sea bottom . . . . The first half is top-drawer as it circles around the missing formula; the rest is less gripping since the formula is on the back burner until the final pages. Even so, well done and much fun with ironic dialogue.