cover image The Cryptos Conundrum

The Cryptos Conundrum

Chase Brandon. Forge, $25.99 (416p) ISBN 978-0-7653-1877-0

At the start of former CIA agent Brandon’s ambitious, wildly inventive first novel, a conspiracy thriller with SF/fantasy overtones, Dr. Jonathan S. Chalmers, a brilliant 26-year-old mathematician and engineer, is serving in an American volunteer unit on the Western front in 1916 when a mysterious apparition saves him from a poison gas attack. This apparition will continue to guide Chalmers through the rest of his unusually long life. In WWII, Chalmers, who still looks like he’s 26, becomes a top OSS official and helps the American government counter the Axis. As part of a master plan by God (aka Savantis Ga’Lawed), he goes on to witness and initiate some of the world’s greatest accomplishments, while solving such mysteries of civilization as how the pyramids were built. This entertaining, if sometimes exhaustive, account threatens to become a laundry list of historical events, conspiracies, and political machinations through the year 4024, but the connections and theories are sure to fascinate many readers. Agent: Erica Silverman, Tekno Books. (June)