From the legendary bestselling author comes his first novel in a decade-a rollicking Washington tale about a media firestorm swirling around a vast Hole in Texas and one obscure sci-entist who gets swept up in the vortex.
Guy Carpenter has a prestigious job at NASA, a devoted wife and new baby, and aside from a troublemaking cat, a settled, quiet. Life. But things take an unexpected turn this regular guy finds himself mixed up international scandal of enormous proportions.
Years ago, Guy worked on the Superconducting Super Collider, a giant government project dedi-cated to detecting a tiny, elusive particle called the Higgs boson. Wrangling in Congress shut the project down before it could succeed, but now the Chinese claim to have found the boson. It is a discovery that sends the nation into a panic. How did the Chinese Surpass American science? What about the horrific military implications of a Boson Bomb? Is it time to start casting Hollywood 's first boson-based block-buster? An expert is needed to assess the new threat to national security.
Guy is propelled into the center of the media blitz, his old love with a Chinese female physic-cist resurfaces. a new romance with a beautiful Congresswoman beckons, and the breakup of his happy marriage threatens. In the meantime, Con-gress holds urgent hearings, Hollwood comes couting, the CIA is investigating, and an unctuous reporter dogs his every step.
Once again, Herman Wouk, the man the New York Times has called''a modern Charles Dickens,” exercises his deep insight and considerable comic powers to give us a witty and keen satire-about Washington, the media, and science, and what hap-pens when these three great forces of American culture clash.
