GLOW

A new club drug tangles a scenester in a global conspiracy in this quirky tale of love and corporate overreach.

The third novel by Beauman (The Teleportation Accident, 2013, etc.) opens with Raf, a 22-year-old Londoner, at a rave, where he hears about an Ecstasy-like drug called glow. He’s intrigued, and not exclusively for pleasure-seeking reasons: Raf suffers from “non-24-hour sleep/wake syndrome,” a condition that wrecks normal circadian rhythms, and studying glow plays into his interest in the body’s peculiar chemistry. But his investigations uncover something more sinister: Paramilitary types in white vans are kidnapping Burmese men, and Raf soon learns of an effort by a multinational mining company, Lacebark, to control production of glow’s organic source in Myanmar. Guiding him through this underworld is Cherish, a half-Burmese woman whose father was a Lacebark executive. She’s smart and tough-minded, and a romance soon develops, but Raf doesn’t know if he can trust the array of ex–Lacebark employees, Burmese expat revolutionaries and rave promoters who make a relatively benign drug seem like a deadly experience in a hurry. (The bulk of the novel takes place across two weeks.) Beauman writes thoughtfully on how drugs play with the senses, and the novel is spiked with clever observations that connect body chemistry with big-data algorithms and corporate exploitation. In other moments, Raf’s bantering with Cherish and his stumblebum investigations add a dose of comedy. But the overall plot is exceedingly convoluted, with just about every character’s motivations called into question until everybody seems like a double or triple agent. This may play into Beauman’s point about the difficulty of nailing down the nature of the human condition, but the closing pages are burdened by who-did-what-to-whom explication.

A respectable effort to play with the thriller form that gets bogged down by those very same thriller mechanics.