Improbable

Adam Fawer

I'm sure you all remember The Da Vinci Code. How can you possibly have forgotten it? Hasn't it been on the bestseller list since the beginning of time? That such a perfectly average thriller could have garnered such a huge following, and still be selling that many copies per week, is absolutely astonishing to me. Especially when so many better, more intelligent thrillers roam the world looking for that kind of devoted readership.

Improbable is one of those thrillers. It attempts many of the same things as does The Da Vinci Code, but where Dan Brown's book fails so miserably in its attempts, Improbable often succeeds.

David Caine is a gambler. He spends most of his nights in the basement of a Russian private club playing Texas Hold 'em and trying unsuccessfully to avoid synaesthesia, usually followed by crippling seizures. One night, after losing a hand he had almost no chance of losing (and going deep into the Russian mob's debt in the process), Caine loses consciousness, only to wake up in the hospital later. He's faced with one last shot at alleviating the problem: an experimental treatment that's never been tested on humans before.

Meanwhile, a CIA agent is selling secrets to the North Koreans, and a professor obsessed with tapping into the unconscious is performing experiments on a grad student he also happens to be sleeping with. How does it all tie together? Wonderfully.

The plot itself, however, is not the true pleasure of reading Improbable. Nor is it the characters, who are somewhat inconsistently drawn; some of them are deep, rich creations, while others are cardboard stereotypes. No, the best thing about Improbable is that Fawer can take you through so many different things that need explaining, explain them, and not break the flow of the story, much less come off sounding didactic. He assumes (perhaps rightly) that his readers know nothing about the ground he's treading, and he fills us in on what we need to know for the book to pack maximum punch. And it does.

The best thriller I've read since Joe Finder's Paranoia. A fantastic debut novel, not to be missed by thriller readers.