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Great science but the Byzantine plot is tough to follow!

David Caine, able to perform astonishingly complex mathematical calculations of probabilities and odds in his head, is a successful compulsive gambler. Playing on credit and beaten badly one night in a game of Texas Hold `Em by a lucky punter who pulled a Royal Flush on the River to trump his four bullets, Caine finds himself in debt to the Russian Mafia. When he suffers a massive grand mal temporal lobe epileptic seizure immediately after losing the hand, he finds himself in the last ditch position of accepting the offer of a dangerous and highly experimental drug treatment in an effort to regain control of his life. Now hostage to the drug regimen, he finds himself unable to flee the Russians and is pulled into the web of a CIA investigation of his doctor's dangerous and unethical experimental drug treatments on unknowing human subjects.

With the help of tough female rogue CIA agent Nava Vaner, Caine scrambles for his life and his sanity as side effects of the drugs give him visions and turn him in a real-life version of "Laplace's Demon" with the ability to tap into the collective unconscious, to see "everywhen", the universe of innumerable myriad outcomes of the world's actions - in short, to know past and present and to affect and predict the future. And there are factions that will do anything to capture Caine to tap into and exploit that power!

While the plot-line for IMPROBABLE can be fairly categorized as outstanding, Fawer's execution in this, his debut novel, falls prey to some typical first novel weaknesses. An overly large cast and excessively complicated plot twists will befuddle and frustrate all but the most attentive readers. Character development is a hit and miss affair, at best. Caine and his schizophrenic brother, Jasper, are fully fleshed out colourful protagonists with a credible, well-constructed set of fears, aspirations, flaws, emotions and strengths. On the other hand, Nava Vaner, comes across as weakly contrived and artificially inserted into the novel to serve as a mandatory female interest.

But then there's the science that, almost magically, Fawer has dropped effortlessly into the maelstrom of a high-speed thriller ... and, my goodness, here is where Fawer excels! Literate, painless, crystal clear lay explanations of a wealth of seemingly un-related topics - biochemistry, schizophrenia, statistics, quantum mechanics, probability theory, "Laplace's Demon", DeMoivre's Theorem, chaos, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Jungian philosophy, Schrodinger's Cat, the birthday paradox and more. And, as wild as this may seem, all of it is used to quite reasonably propel the plot forward. (If Fawer ever decides to write a popular science non-fiction book, I'll snap it up in a heartbeat!)

No doubt some readers will see IMPROBABLE as a five-star smash thriller. The plot confusion factor will almost certainly cause others to set it aside as a "did not finish". I'll call it three stars and anticipate that Fawer's next novel will reflect his deeper experience as a published author.

Paul Weiss