Pun Salad

This book was on the WSJ list of Best Mysteries of 2024. (WSJ gifted link). The author, Nova Jacobs, previously wrote The Last Equation of Isaac Severy, which I dismissed as "not my cup of tea" last year. Good news: I liked this one a lot better!

It is set mostly at CERN, site of much high-energy physics research. Most notable is its Large Hadron Collider (LHC), most famous for proving the existence of the long-theorized Higgs Boson back in 2012.

Ms. Jacobs adds some fictional interest, starting with a different kind of LHC discovery: the tunnel contains the corpse of physicist Howard Anderby, who seems to have been fatally irradiated in the LHC tunnel. Except nobody can figure out how he got in there, bypassing security. And nobody can figure out why the LHC got turned on at that time. It's sort of a double locked-room mystery.

CERN is located on the France-Switzerland border, in a kind of law enforcement limbo. To minimize bad publicity, CERN research group director Chloé Grimaud and Yvonne Faye, head of CERN, ask their erstwhile companion, private investigator Sabine Leroux, to see if she can track down the facts behind Howard's death.

Complicating things: the apparent cybertheft of CERN data by the competing supercollider group in China. And also another corpse found drowned in CERN's (fictional) water tank housing liquid xenon dark matter detection experiment.

The book alternates its timeline between events that happened before Howard's death and Sabine's investigation. The "before" timeline follows postdoc Eve, who becomes infatuated with Howard, and eventually discovers things about him that are … well … kind of Out There. By the time that's revealed, I was having too much fun to mind.