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The new millennium has brought a flood of exciting thrillers about interrelated secrets: cryptic codes, religious mysteries, clandestine conspiracies, and secret histories. These include Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code; Jane Jensen's Dante's Equation; and Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. To their impressive ranks add Howard Hendrix's idea-packed novel The Labyrinth Key, which explores the relationships between cryptography and the Inquisition, cybertech and the Kabbalah, and quantum physics and life after death.
Brilliant researcher Jaron Kwok is working to develop a quantum computer, which could crack any cryptographic code, while creating code uncrackable by all other computers. Whoever invents the first quantum computer will permanently win the twenty-first-century Cold War between China and the U.S. Then Kwok, an American, disappears from his Hong Kong hotel room, leaving behind only ashes and melted computer equipment. Has Kwok been killed, or kidnapped? Or has he succeeded in creating the quantum computer, and disappeared with it into another universe? The Cold War heats up as another brilliant American researcher, Benjamin Cho, and a relentless Chinese police detective, Marilyn Lu, race to solve the mystery, though its solution may destroy not only the world, but the universe--and, perhaps, an infinitude of alternative universes. --Cynthia Ward
From Publishers Weekly
In this busy tale of near-future virtual reality and real-life espionage, Hendrix (Empty Cities of the Full Moon) mixes Renaissance Kabbalism, quantum computing and the memory techniques of a 16th-century Jesuit priest into a narrative of secret societies and spy agencies fighting to shape the course of human evolution. The disappearance of historian Jaron Kwok in China sets the Asian superpower and America on a collision course. Kwok's college roommate and now replacement, Ben Cho, is charged by his NSA superiors with finding out what the historian discovered in the old files of a CIA China expert. Meanwhile, Hong Kong detective Lu Mei-lin ("Marilyn Lu") struggles to solve Kwok's strange vanishing act, working on the only clue left behind, a pile of nanotech ashes. Hendrix plays with the concept of labyrinths and mazes as devices that both hide and reveal. The book features abstruse speculation on memory and forgetting, on the making and breaking of secrets and the mind's ability to manipulate the quantum nature of reality. Unfortunately, the earnestness of conspiracy theory punctures the dizzying metaphysical bubbles Hendrix blows, leaving the story a bit flat. And in an infinitude of infinite universes, where everything occurs, tragedy loses its significance and sting.
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