The God Particle »

There is a divine spark within us all.
In one man, that spark is about to explode.

American businessman Steve Keeley is hurtled three stories to the cold cobblestone street in Zurich. In the days that follow, a doctor performs miraculous surgery on Keeley, who wakes up to find that everything about his world has changed. He seems to sense things before they happen, and he thinks he’s capable of feats that are clearly impossible. It’s a strange and compelling new world for him, one he quickly realizes is also incredibly dangerous.

Meanwhile at a $12 billion facility in hardscrabble North Texas, a super collider lies two hundred feet beneath the Earth’s surface. Leading a team of scientists, Mike McNair, a brilliant physicist, works to uncover one of the universe’s greatest secrets–a theoretical particle that binds the universe together, often called The God Particle. When his efforts are undermined by the man who has poured his own vast fortune into the project, McNair begins to suspect that something in his research has gone very, very wrong.

Now, these two men are about to come together, battling mysteries of science and of the soul–and venturing to a realm beyond reason, beyond faith, perhaps even beyond life and death.

Kirkus Reviews

Laden with eye-popping special effects, Cox's follow-up to his 2004 debut (Rift) turns on speculative high-energy physics and the Higgs bosun. In Zurich for a meeting of his international automotive parts company, Steve Keeley buys a $20,000 engagement ring for his girl back in the States. But a call to her cell phone finds her bombed and riotously in the act with a pickup. Stunned, Steve himself gets bombed, picks up a Russian whore in a cabaret and later is pushed out a three-story window. Following life-saving brain surgery, he wakes from a coma after several days with nothing broken, only a head injury. A bit later the Russian whore shows up and returns his ring. Leaving the hospital, Steve goes back to the cabaret to thank her, only to find that she died from a fall just like his . . . the day after he fell. So did a ghost return his ring? Soon Steve finds that he can foresee what people think before they say it. He also feels surrounded by a hallucinatory force field and something that follows him about. Meanwhile, down in Texas, Mike McNair heads experiments on the huge, atom-smashing supercollider searching for the Higgs boson (aka, the God particle). Mike has big political problems with his boss, who may replace him with Samantha, a smart Chinese physicist from the Swiss supercollider in Geneva. We and all matter in the universe are literally stardust held together by the Higgs boson. And it's the Higgs force field that has taken over Steve Keeley, who must collide with McNair. A gripper of a yarn, swatting around really big ideas. Laughably not clothbound.