The Babel Effect

A stunning post-millennial thriller from the author of PUPPETS. Genius husband-and-wife team Ryan and Jessamine McCloud are founders of Genesis, an unorthodox problem-solving think tank. Commissioned by a billionaire corporate chief to study the causes of the rising tide of global violence and social unrest, they begin to fear that a kind of disease is behind it all. They christen this the Babel Effect. Could there be a biomedical explanation for a kind of global insanity? Or is something else at the root of the problem? The investigation is brutally interrupted when Jessamine is kidnapped, and in the face of opposition from sinister and powerful organisations, Ryan McCloud grows increasingly desperate to find a way of halting the contagion of the Babel Effect, before it's too late for his family - before it's too late for mankind.

The Genesis Project, headed by Ryan and Jess McCloud, is researching a fascinating thesis: that violence is a virus, that evil is genetically based, and that neurology can prove what psychology only suggests. A billionaire who heads the world's largest media and technology empire believes the McClouds are onto something with enormous potential value and agrees to underwrite their project, which starts with brain scans of death row inmates and progresses to war zones and killing fields all over the world.

When pregnant Jess is kidnapped by a religious leader, who fears that science will destroy his faith-based empire, the action ratchets up several levels, skipping over some of the hard science that keeps this would-be thriller mired in detail much of the time. Author Daniel Hecht posits as good a raison d'être for the root causes of violence as any other suspense novelist; it's an intriguing idea, well-worked out in the plot. And Jess McCloud, vainly trying to reconcile her decidedly unscientific faith with scientific empiricism, is an interestingly complex character. Unfortunately, she's missing for much of the novel, and her husband, whose efforts to retrace her research in order to find her, is a much less fascinating hero. But that won't stop fans of Robin Cook, Michael Crichton, et al. for sticking with Hecht to the last page. --Jane Adams