Chris Kirkham – Decoherence: A Quantum Whodunnit

You have to salute a debut novel that swaggers its ambition. Boasting the subtitle “A quantum whodunnit”, Decoherence duly boasts chapters called ‘Entanglement’, ‘Wave Function’, ‘Entropy’ and so on. Our hero, Sirius Peabody, is a theoretical physicist, and his way of seeing the world is very much the substrate of this cheerful murder mystery. Chris Kirkham has great fun with this: “The whole police approach defied the laws of physics”, says Sirius at one point. And since the police are notoriously Newtonian in their approach to crime, Peabody and his new best friend, the lovely Annabelle Bronte (yes, she has a sister) feel compelled to try to solve the crime with reference to the wave-particle duality and super-positioning. It sounds more high falutin’ than it really is. Chris never lets the physics get in the way of the phun.