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Zusatztext Publishers Weekly Orwellian echoes haunt this provocative! tongue-in-cheek debut chiller....A suspenseful! cerebral satire.... Informationen zum Autor Noah Hawley is the author of five novels. He lives in Austin, Texas and Los Angeles, California with his wife and two children. Klappentext Linus Owen is a young professor of conspiracy theory at a small college just outside San Francisco. He teaches graduate-level classes on JFK and gives seminars on magic-bullet theories and how the symbols on the dollar bill reveal the presence of a secret government that is leading the world to ruin.Linus' marriage is foundering and his wife, Claudia, an up-and-coming advertising executive, has gone to Chicago to visit her mother. But if Claudia is in Chicago, how is it that two FBI agents show up at Linus' office and inform him that Claudia has been killed in a plane crash on her way from New York to Brazil? And why did a man named Jeffrey Holden, the vice president of a major pharmaceutical company, buy her ticket and die beside her?Enlisting the aid of Edward and Roy -- his friends and fellow conspiracy theorists -- Linus heads across the country in search of answers. Along the way, the trio encounters a legion of disturbing and provocative characters and clues, including an irascible talk show host, a mind-controlling drug, and an emerging link between Claudia's ad agency and the U.S. government. As their journey progresses, it becomes frighteningly clear that they've left the realm of the academic and are tangled up in a dangerous, multilayered cover-up. Finally, deep in the heart of the American desert, stunned by an ominous revelation, Linus sees he has a new mission: to try to stay alive.With writing that is electric, whip-smart, and suspenseful at each turn, Noah Hawley draws us into a deliciously labyrinthine world of paranoia and plots. Leseprobe Chapter One Linus is afraid of money. Not the smaller bills, the Washingtons and Lincolns, the Jacksons and Grants, but the larger sums, the cashier's checks with multiple zeros, the stock portfolios and escrow accounts, afraid too of what they buy, the new cars with their leather stink, the first-class seats on airplanes, the cellular phones and fax modems. He is afraid of office towers, where currency is acquired, afraid of suburban mansions and large screen TVs. He is alarmed by purebred dogs. Expensive suits make his teeth chatter, shoes that shine, organic fruits and vegetables purchased at gleaming, politically correct supermarkets, monogrammed handkerchiefs, pipes and cigars, flat platinum credit cards, symphony tickets, bread machines and espresso makers, ski weekends and barbecues with salmon and free-range chicken, bed-and-breakfasts, four-wheel-drive vehicles owned by anyone not living on the side of a mountain, laser disc players, multiple CD changers, summer houses and winter houses, spontaneous weekend getaways, the games of tennis and golf, penny loafers, angora sweaters, dry martinis and tenyear-old scotch, bay windows that don't look out over parking lots or weed-cluttered yards, but over real bays, jacuzzi bathtubs, all of Western Europe (especially France and Switzerland), electronic organizers with global position satellite locators, season tickets to anything, waterproof watches, corporate vice-presidents, crystal, gold. He is suspicious of comfort, not to mention luxury. He fears the implications of wealth, though he has never really had any. "I'm too cynical to be rich," he says. He equates financial success with a certain soullessness. This has been his philosophy since the early days of his youth. It is a byproduct of his own juvenile poverty politicized, and yet somehow he has found a certain comfort now in his middle age, sipping home-brewed coffee in the living room of his own home, looking out a bay window at a small section of San Francisco Bay. He is well aware of the contradictio...
