<p align="center">A brilliant new talent bursts on to the thriller<br /> scene with a dazzling work of spellbinding<br /> fiction, a riveting story of chance, fate,<br /> and numbers, and one man's strange journey past<br /> the boundaries of the possible into the chilling realm of the ...
Improbable After nightfall, David Caine inhabits a world of risk, obsession, rich rewards, and sudden, destructive downfalls. A compulsive gambler possessing a brilliant mathematical mind -- and an uncanny ability to calculate odds in the blink of an eye -- he prowls the underground poker clubs of Manhattan, winning more than he loses. But Caine is a man prone to crippling epileptic incidents -- and one night he makes a costly miscalculation, suffering the most intense seizure he has ever experienced. And his life spins madly out of control.
Desperate to regain his equilibrium, he agrees to test an experimental drug with unnerving side effects. Suddenly he is having visions of the past, present, and future; either peering through a window into an alternate reality or teetering on the precipice of a psychotic breakdown. Chemistry and destiny have colluded to grant David Caine the astonishing ability to foresee the consequences of his actions and the probability of various outcomes, both good andterrible.
But with his "gift" comes grave danger, for he is not the only one who knows his secret. Frightening powers operating from the shadows now want him for their own, forcing Caine to seek help from a most improbable ally -- a beautiful rogue CIA agent skilled in the death arts -- on a desperate race for survival with his sanity hanging by the slenderest of threads.
A riveting amalgam of explosive action, ingenious twists and turns, dynamic characters, breathtaking writing, and brilliant extrapolation, Adam Fawer's extraordinary debut, Improbable, is the novel of the year.
Industry Reviews
What would happen if a compulsive gambler gained the ability to see the future? Having been touted as demigods on innumerable business magazine covers, executives apparently think it's time to get into the novel-writing game as well, though one hopes the average product will be better than former About.com CEO Fawer's first try. A heartless melange of just about every hack bestseller subgenre you could imagine (Crichton, Cook and Ludlum are purists compared to Fawer's unabashed copycatism), Improbable is, in theory, about what happens when Manhattan gambling addict David Caine is offered an experimental drug by a too-good-to-be-true doctor in order to help with seizures. He's also into a Russian mobster for a few thousand, and his twin brother, Jasper, is now out of the asylum but no less insane. Then there's Nava Vaner, a standard-issue CIA contract killer, who's also selling secrets to the North Koreans and gets wrapped up in some subterfuge involving the drug that Caine has ingested. What makes the shadowy powers behind the scenes interested in poor Caine-who, before he went in for treatment, was just a gambling junkie uncommonly good at calculations-is that once on this drug, he shows signs of becoming the personification of Laplace's Demon, a mathematical theorem describing an all-knowing intelligence that can predict the future. Fawer is much too fond of talking math and quantum physics at length, a trait that can make for jarring transitions back into Nava's Spy vs. Spy-style activities (she eventually hooks up with Caine and together they fight the forces of darkness); but at the very least, no reader will come away from Improbable without knowing a great deal about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. To his credit, Fawer writes pretty well, even if he does put in too much information about statistics. Cold and mechanical: fiction by computer. (Kirkus Reviews)
