Larry Bassett’s Reviews > Critical Mass > Status Update

I sat in the tub under the shower, rinsing the mud out of my hair. When I finally felt clean, I filled the tub and lay back, almost comatose, letting the hot water soak into my ripped-up muscles.

Twice before, electronically sophisticated thugs had jumped me in my own place. As my pals in Homeland Security had proven, the most sophisticated security is meaningless for someone with the right equipment.

“Victoria, you are so incoherent that you can barely speak, let alone drive,” Max said. “You’ve had a rough day, but besides that, the letter you brought has been a deep shock for Lotty. Let’s stop trying to untangle this knot and get some rest.”

Maybe Cordell Breen was right and I wasn’t enough of a detective for a case this intellectual. And maybe I’m not enough of a mystery reader for a book like this so computeristic!

“DTs,” I printed in block capitals, short for Drug Thugs. “DTs killed Schlafly and Kitty (probably). HSTs—Homeland Security Thugs—are monitoring my e-mail because Cordell Breen has asked FBI to find Martin Binder.

In 1940, no one knew if you could have a self-sustaining chain reaction, which apparently was essential for turning atoms into bombs. Physicists like Heisenberg in Germany and Fermi in America built nuclear reactors to see if they could create a chain reaction.

It is not easy to make the development of the atomic bomb and nuclear physics, a major storyline in this series. I have to say that the effort may be admirable, but it did struggle a little in the effort.

“My mother. That’s what I wanted to talk to him about. He had been her professor, she revered him. Not me, not her child, I was never important to her. Only those invisible particles she spent day and night with. She saw atoms, but she couldn’t see me.

Unless Martin had proof that the prize was bogus. I was going around in circles. Whatever awful secret Martin saw in Edward Breen’s old workshop couldn’t have been a blatant statement from Dzornen that he’d faked his research. That was a big “if,” anyway.

Liu had touted the system as a breakthrough for people with stroke or spinal cord damage. Breen had suggested the project had defense applications. I tried to imagine what those might be.