Mark Alpert, Final Theory [Library of Babel]

I’ve gotten a fair number of free science books in the last few years, from publishers looking for bloggy publicity, but Mark Alpert’s Final Theory is the first time that I’ve been asked to review a novel on ScienceBlogs (I’ve gotten advance copies of some other novels, but I’ve specifically requested those). Mark Alpert is an editor at Scientific American, and Final Theory is his debut as a writer of thrillers.

David Swift, a former physics student turned historian of science, gets a call to come to the dying bedside of Hans Kleinman, a former mentor from his physics days, who has been brutally tortured. Before he dies, Kleinman whispers a string of numbers that he says hold the key to finding a theory of everything– in his younger days, Kleinman was one of Albert Einstein’s assistants, and it seems that Einstein in fact succeeded in finding the unified field theory (“Einheitliche Feldtheorie” in German), but hid the results from the world because he feared how it would be used.

Shortly after Kleinman dies, David is detained by the FBI, and interrogated to find out what he knows. After a harrowing escape during an attack on the building where David is being held, he finds himself on the run, trying to figure out the theory before he’s caught by either the FBI or the sinister Russian mercenary who tortured and killed Kleinman and Einstein’s other assistants.

I’m all in favor of the idea of this book. It’s a thriller that uses science as the hook, and scientists as the main characters. The physics discussions are a little improbable, but the basic use of the ideas is solid– Alpert avoids the sort of ridiculous howlers that plague so many of the appearances of physics in pop culture. And I definitely support having more books out there that depict physics as exciting enough to kill people over.

The fact of the book is hampered, for me, by the fact that I’m just not much of a thriller reader. And while somebody probably could build a The Name of the Rose style intellectual thriller in which the entire plot turns around an abstract point of theory, this is not that book. It’s very much a standard thriller, with car chases and gun battles and dastardly villains and a ticking-bomb scenario in which only David and his companions can save the world.

This is not a book that will be remembered for its deathless prose, in other words.

I suspect that it’s a solid entry in the thriller genre, but that’s not my preferred genre of trashy fiction, so it’s a little hard for me to evaluate fairly. There were some eye-rolling moments, but I can’t really say whether they would bother somebody who regularly read the bestselling authors whose blurbs adorn the cover.

(I sketched the plot for Kate last night, and she looked dubious. “Does this book have any female characters?” she asked. “Why, yes,” I said, “there’s a brilliant and beautiful black woman string theorist who helps figure everything out.” “Oh,” she said, “one of those.”)

I hate to give this a “Sure to appeal to people who read this sort of thing” review, because I think we could use more thrillers by people who have read more of a physics textbook than the index. But really, that’s all I can honestly say– if you like Douglas Preston, Tess Gerritson, Kyle Mills, and Javier Sierra (to choose some names off the back cover), you may very well like this.