When David Foster Wallace, a brilliant writer of both fiction and nonfiction, killed himself less than two years ago, I was as taken aback as many of his fans.  I hadn’t read all of his work yet, and perhaps I’d missed what in retrospect seem strong hints of irremediable depression.  I always figured he was a realist who was in touch with life’s darker, more absurd side, as I see myself.  But his unhappiness was deeper than that.

The first piece of his I read was an essay called “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” Reading that long piece just prior to taking a cruise with my in-laws, I realized this was a writer I wouldn’t be able to get enough of.  Which turned out to be far too true.  (That essay, in its original Harper’s Magazine incarnation, can be found online here. If it’s your kind of writing and thinking, you’ll be hooked.)

The world may not end with a bang, but with a bioweapon. A new thriller, The Ark, posits a bad guy who heads a cult and wants to end the world as we know it. His method: a highly contagious disease that was found on Noah’s Ark. The Biblical elements seem incidental to much of the action (to me, anyway). The scientists are the good guys.

The hero of this debut thriller is an engineer, much like the author himself, Boyd Morrison.

Morrison, with a Ph.D. in industrial engineering, has worked for NASA, Microsoft’s Xbox Games Group, and Thomson-RCA.  He was also a Jeopardy! Champion, as well as a professional actor. He was able to get a good agent, but The Ark was rejected by 25 publishers.  Morrison self-published it for Kindle, and then, after early online sales showed promise, secured a four-book deal from a major publisher (Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster).

Intrigued by the idea of an engineer hero, I read The Ark and tried to figure out why it works, and where it doesn’t.