The Man Who Saw in Seconds is an absolute thrill ride. The first hundred pages read like the single, continuous long shot opening of a Jason Bourne film. The novel is also packed with physics, philosophy, and intel on military and police procedures.
If you liked “The Queen’s Gambit,” this novel has a bit of chess in it and a lot of human dynamics, mastermind thinking, and an anti-hero prodigy. If you liked, the British science fiction mystery thriller miniseries “Bodies,” featuring detectives from different eras investigating the same murder, then you’ll appreciate that time is not absolute. Our main character Preble Jefferson, can see 5 seconds into the future. To paraphrase Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the past, present, and future is a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Preble finds himself in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare when his snarky comments to New York police officer in a subway car has him running through a hail of bullets to escape custody. Things escalate from there (truly possible). Preble, with the help of his paranoid, anarchist, Hungarian friend (and lawyer) named Fish, turns himself into police, which makes matters worse (truly possible).
Political thriller, spy novel, science fiction time travel, philosophy of time, police satire, revolutionary drama—this book is exciting.