Book Review: The Stars Turned Inside Out by Nova Jacobs

When electrical engineer Claude Touschard goes into the circular subterranean tunnel that makes up a large part of the “Machine”, as the Large Hadron Collider is known to the people who work on and with it, it is for a perhaps eccentric form of recreation. Claude has permission to cycle along the massive corridor while the Machine is down for recalibration and the route thus safe enough from radiation to traverse. Not very many people are allowed into the Machine, and entrance is strictly supervised, so the last thing he expects to find there is a corpse. Worse, the dead man was clearly killed by radiation exposure.

The publicly funded European Center for Nuclear Research – a laboratory more commonly known by its French acronym CERN – that administers the Machine has no interest in the adverse publicity that will inevitably come with a discovery like this. Since the lab has been given a certain degree of legal independence due to its location straddling the border of two nations, CERN director-general Yvonne Faye decides to bring in a private investigator to figure out what happened before they’re forced to turn the case over to national authorities.

Sabine Leroux is not only an accomplished detective with years of experience from working in the Swiss police, but also a close friend from university who once shared physics classes with Yvonne. She’s thus uniquely positioned to investigate the death, and whether a crime, if any, has been committed. While some of the dead man’s colleagues posit that it’s an open and shut case of self-harm, Yvonne isn’t so sure:

“We don’t know that it was suicide,” Yvonne continued. “And before we can resume operations, we need to figure out how the Machine got activated in the first place when it was supposed to have been dormant. And second, we need to isolate the breach to determine how Dr. Anderby gained access to the tunnel while evidently bypassing the eye scanners and lift cameras.”

 

Simon leaned back in his chair, attempting a sudden breeziness. “That’s easy. He used CERN’s supersecret underground maze.”

 

Yvonne shot Simon a look of warning.

 

“I’m serious,” he insisted. “What if the labyrinth hiding beneath the lab is more than just a legend whispered among grad students? Maybe this Anderby was kidnapped by CERN’s colony of trolls.”

Urban legends aside, Sabine’s investigations mean that she has to learn just as much about CERN as she does the victim. Dr Howard Anderby had been a bit of a loner on the research campus, mostly by choice. Having transferred in from a rival Chinese facility, his theories were often considered outlandish at best. His lack of friends make it easier for wild theories to circulate about what really happened to him on the night he lost his life.

His closest companion, however, knows that Howard had no intention of burning himself to death that night. Dr. Eve Marsh had had a complicated relationship with Howard, and is devastated when he turns up dead. She very much wants to cooperate with Sabine but her grief and her own inability to parse what happened to him complicate her ability to communicate with the detective. Even her description of her work is colored by her sorrow:

But her mood being what it was, she gave Sabine a more desolate analogy. She spoke of the physicist as crash investigator–each proton collision a horrific plane or car wreck, after which she and her colleagues must sort through the resulting devastation for clues. For months alone, she might work on a single scrap of metal or stray body part in the debris. Far more thrilling, of course (the whole point of the endeavor, really), was to stumble upon a rare shape or substance one couldn’t identify, a completely alien thing. A thing, in fact, that had been formed out of the crash itself. What might this newfound object say about not just the collision but the makeup of our universe?

As Sabine investigates this rarefied milieu of particle physics and theoretical science, she uncovers a world of petty jealousies, personal secrets and international intrigue. But who had reason to want Howard dead? The more she learns, the more Sabine is convinced that Howard was indeed murdered, and by someone who won’t hesitate to strike again.

Elegant and romantic, this locked room mystery set in one of the most exclusive scientific enclaves in the world is a must-read for anyone who loves mysteries, science and, especially, that vanishing point between hard fact and science fiction. Don’t worry, fellow deus ex machina haters: the murder is very much rooted in human criminality. That delicious frisson of extrasensory possibility, however – and make no mistake, in these pages that possibility is perhaps little more than a thought experiment –  is merely the luscious cherry on an intellectually fulfilling cake. Full of the wonder of science and the sometimes bittersweet joys of solving mysteries, this is a book for the reader who loves knowledge not only for its own sake, but for the ways in which we can use it to keep working towards a better world.