OPENING LINES:

“They’ve found the pilot.” Twelve hundred miles away in New York, Red Queen breathed out. “What do we know?” “More or less nothing…”

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Oh my…this was a juicy, nerdy, contemporary fiction read. Mathematicians, graduate students, operatives from the Directorate of the Extremely Improbable populate this fun, funny book about what happens when ordinary people get caught in the middle of very strange things happening. Why are all the cars on the freeway white? Why does the iPod play the same song over and over even though it is set on random? Why do you end up in the same motel as the person you are trying to find, only you don’t learn this until the next day? Are these things truly coincidental, or is there some mechanism driving the probabilities? And if there is, what is it, who created it, and what is its purpose? Two fictional (or are they?) government agencies are trying to answer these questions as they chase a young Brit across the southern United States on his quest to reach his girlfriend in San Francisco where he plans to propose marriage. It sounds zany…and that’s because it is. I knew a book that started with a vintage airplane that seemed to create itself out of tin cans in the middle of Alabama and then promptly exploded leaving behind a stripper dressed as a pilot was going to be good. But I didn’t bank on it being filled with dry British wit and characters so quirky I wanted to meet them at a cocktail party.

Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Coincidence Engine