The Labyrinth Key

The new millennium has brought a flood of exciting thrillers about interrelated secrets: cryptic codes, religious mysteries, clandestine conspiracies, and secret histories. These include Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code; Jane Jensen's Dante's Equation; and Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. To their impressive ranks add Howard Hendrix's idea-packed novel The Labyrinth Key, which explores the relationships between cryptography and the Inquisition, cybertech and the Kabbalah, and quantum physics and life after death.

Brilliant researcher Jaron Kwok is working to develop a quantum computer, which could crack any cryptographic code, while creating code uncrackable by all other computers. Whoever invents the first quantum computer will permanently win the twenty-first-century Cold War between China and the U.S. Then Kwok, an American, disappears from his Hong Kong hotel room, leaving behind only ashes and melted computer equipment. Has Kwok been killed, or kidnapped? Or has he succeeded in creating the quantum computer, and disappeared with it into another universe? The Cold War heats up as another brilliant American researcher, Benjamin Cho, and a relentless Chinese police detective, Marilyn Lu, race to solve the mystery, though its solution may destroy not only the world, but the universe--and, perhaps, an infinitude of alternative universes. --Cynthia Ward