Why You'll Love This
A man with a perfect memory and a DARPA teleportation device that's definitely not as safe as anyone claims — what could go wrong?
- Great if you want: sci-fi mystery with creeping dread and a genuinely clever protagonist
- The experience: fast-paced but building — the unease tightens slowly, then snaps
- The writing: Clines seeds answers early and trusts sharp readers to notice
- Skip if: you want hard science — the physics is more thriller fuel than rigor
About This Book
Something strange is happening in the California desert. A team of DARPA researchers has built a device that folds space itself — one step in, hundreds of feet out, perfectly safe. Except the scientists who built it are hiding something, and the only person with the right kind of mind to figure out what that is happens to be a quietly brilliant man named Mike Erikson, living a deliberately small life in a small New England town. When his old friend drags him into the investigation, Mike starts noticing the kinds of details that don't add up — the kind that suggest the Albuquerque Door isn't just bending distance. It might be bending something else entirely.
Peter Clines excels at building dread through accumulation — small wrongnesses that stack up long before the full picture snaps into focus. The prose is clean and propulsive, the kind that makes pages disappear, but underneath the momentum is careful, deliberate architecture. Clines layers mystery inside science fiction inside something darker and stranger, and the real pleasure is in watching those layers peel back. Readers who appreciate a slow-burn reveal executed with genuine discipline will find this one difficult to put down.
