Amazon.com Review
Johann Wolff, a German scientist and émigré, resettles in a Midwestern university town after World War II, and within months he mysteriously disappears. A half century later, Ted Sandstrom, an experimental physicist, announces to a small audience of his fellow scientists that he has discovered a method for generating vast amounts of power with a small quantum energy device. The scientists include Nolan Kilkenny, a former Navy Seal who will transfer Ted's research into the industrialized sector, and Oksanna Zoschenko, a Ukranian physicist who understands that Sandstrom's work has vast implications for the global economy as well as the future of science. The connection between Sandstrom and Wolff is at the heart of this suspense thriller; Wolff's missing notebooks not only presage Sandstrom's research, but also hold the key to utilizing it to change the world.
Meanwhile, Victor Orlov, a powerful Russian industrialist, sends his own private army of killers to steal Sandstrom's work and turn it over to his own scientists to create a vast new industry that will destabilize the economic and geopolitical balance. Orlov's only obstacle is Kilkenny (from Spyder Web), who makes a welcome appearance in Quantum. He's a hero in the Tom Clancy tradition, a one-man army. The sometimes plodding story will appeal primarily to readers with enough scientific knowledge to understand the complicated physics of Wolff's and Sandstrom's work and a compelling interest in how new technology impacts the world economy. --Jane Adams
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Like James Bond, ex-navy SEAL Nolan Kilkenny battles to keep a potentially world-dominating technology from falling into the wrong hands in this exciting techno-thriller, a follow-up to Grace's first Nolan adventure, Spyder Web. In 1948, ?migr? German scientist Johann Wolff, working at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, studies his research notes and makes an amazing discovery. (" 'Mein Gott!' Wolff cried out, as an image of the delicate, multidimensional structures that define both matter and energy clearly formed in his mind.") Minutes later, he is deadAkilled by a Jewish assassin who thinks (erroneously) that the scientist conducted research on humans for the Nazis. More than 50 years later, Wolff's research becomes vitally important, as Kilkenny, who coordinates projects for a research group called MARC on the Ann Arbor campus, finds himself and his colleagues under attack by a band of Russian mercenaries working for Victor Orlov, the richest and most powerful private citizen in Russia. Orlov has learned that MARC, inspired by Wolff's writings, has discovered a Theory of EverythingAsought in vain by Einstein and other great physicistsAthat will create an infinite energy supply and make all other sources, from gasoline to nuclear power, obsolete. Grace's prose can be clumsy, and his plot requires some suspension of belief. But in Kilkenny and his family (Nolan's father, an international financier, funded MARC, and grandfather Martin, a woodworker, was a friend of Johann Wolff), he has created a moving human portrait of America's technological progress. A few explosive action scenes (including a shoot-out at a college street art fair) enliven this nicely textured adventure. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
