Peter Clines takes a fascinating idea – instantaneous travel – adds a background setting of creeping dread, likable  characters, good dialogue and writing to make a fun novel, The Fold.  Lead character Mike Erikson teaches high school English but he’s not your typical teacher.  He’s brilliant and remembers everything, everything he ever saw, read, heard, felt, thought.

Mike’s old friend in DARPA asks him to check out a group DARPA funds that seemingly has incredible success, yet is frustratingly unwilling to take more steps or widen their discovery.  This friend wants to use the technology, called the Fold, to revolutionize travel if it works, or to stop the research funding if it does not.  Everyone says the Fold works, that it is perfectly safe.  Yet everyone on the project is uneasy and one previous investigator came out of his trip somewhat changed.

Mike learns the Fold actually doesn’t move you from point A to point B, but exchanges you with someone else in a very close alternate reality.  Oops.  And sometimes, if there are more people around, the alternate reality is not close at all.  After one researcher comes through the Fold with radiation burns that are at least a year old, the science team comes clean about what they have and how they developed it.  It is true Mad Science, based on the metaphysical ramblings and equations of a Victorian fruitcake.

Now Mike has a problem, because the Fold isn’t shutting down.  And it isn’t connecting anywhere benign either.

The plot is excellent.  We learn more about the characters throughout the story and author Peter Clines does a very good job with creating characters that we can relate to.  The primary hero, Mike, is amazingly smart, in fact a little too brilliant to be completely believable.  He comes in from outside the project, armed with his eidetic memory  and pattern skills and quickly understands the project.  It takes him some time and some inexplicable happenings to see the most likely rationale, an alternate world.  Once he does it’s obvious to everyone that the Fold offers great promise and even greater threat.

I did have a little problem visualizing the setting.  The scientists built the fold in a concrete building with several rooms.  The action takes place in a few of those rooms and in a couple of the alternate worlds.  It was the building that I had a hard time visualizing, but that is minor quibble.  (How exciting is a concrete building?)

Overall The Fold is entertaining, an enjoyable fast read.

4 Stars