A drug designed by the military weaponizes people's nostalgia in this sinuous and transfixing collaboration from Macdonald (H Is for Hawk) and Blaché. After an American roadside diner magically appears outside of a U.S. air base in England, the two operatives dispatched to investigate--former MI6 agent Sunil Rao and American intelligence officer Adam Rubenstein--trace its likely origins to Lunastus-Dainsleif, a lab in Aurora, Colo., that runs the military-funded Eos Prophet program. Prophet is a wildly unpredictable pharmacologic agent that induces material approximations of fond memories--referred to as Eos Prophet Generated Objects, or EPGOs--but at a grievous cost for the user: a psychic break, and sometimes death. Rao and Rubenstein prove immune to the side effects, which makes them the perfect agents to study the drug. The novel's denouement, in which Rao, Rubenstein, and their ops team navigate a landscape booby-trapped with rogue EPGOs to rescue Lunastus's CEO, is wildly surreal with occasional flashes of dark humor, such as a Pac-Man machine that physically consumes a man who was once addicted to the game. The authors' most irresistible achievement, though, is their odd-couple pairing of the Dionysian Rao with the fastidious Rubenstein, who bicker and banter contentiously despite their fondness for each other. The well-matched authors make good on their audacious premise. (Aug.)

An intriguing and deftly plotted (if overstuffed) hybrid of dystopian SF, medical thriller, and queer romance. Chaotic, irreverent Sunil Rao, an ex--MI6 agent plucked from jail for the assignment, and cool, analytical, ultraorderly Adam Rubenstein, an American intelligence officer, have worked together before under extremely trying circumstances, and when a bizarre series of events unfolds at a U.S. air base in Britain, culminating in the sudden appearance in the countryside of a full-sized generic American diner, the two are reunited to investigate. Rao has the uncanny ability not only to detect lies, but to intuit the truth of anything said in his presence, and the buttoned-up Adam is the only person he can't read, an inscrutability that makes their collaboration possible and creates odd-couple tension. Soon they land at a top-secret lab in Colorado, on the trail of a new pharmacologic substance called Prophet. The drug, which resembles mercury, has the effect of spontaneously creating comfort objects from the nostalgic memories of those exposed to it...but with horrendous side effects: The affected person disappears down the rabbit hole of the memory, plunging into a comalike state, sometimes even dying. Worse, those effects--aided by reckless experimentation--are intensifying; the protean substance keeps evolving unpredictably. Adam and Rao turn out to be perfectly suited to the investigation; after an initial exposure, the former is immune to Prophet (it even shrinks from him), and the latter proves able to extract and assimilate the drug. The book's first section feels a bit languid and talky, but the pace accelerates in the middle, and the long final action sequence, in which Rao, Adam, and a team of military contractors negotiate a bizarre, surreal, deadly desert landscape of plush toys (some of them animate), bicycles, arcade games, golden apple trees, and the like, is excellent: pulse-pounding, philosophically fascinating, even blackly funny. The romance plot feels both fresh (in who its principals are) and creaky (there's too much slow-on-the-uptake and swelling music). A crisply written, inventive, complicated brew of a novel, though one that could have used some boiling down. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

When a classic American diner appears out of nowhere on an English field, it's time to call on a special-ops team of opposites whose many skills include cheerfully vicious banter. Sunil Rao is a gay, brilliant, gleefully mocking former M16 agent overly fond of inebriation and starting fights. Possessed of an extraordinary ability to detect fakes and lies, he was nearly destroyed by an assignment in the torture chambers of Kabul. American intelligence officer Adam Rubenstein is pin-neat, laconic, disciplined, loyal, and far more complicated than he seems. They're sent to Colorado and Nevada to pursue the mad-villain calamity of Prophet, an ever-morphing substance meant, diabolically enough, to induce nostalgia for a fantasy perfect past, but which, instead, empowers people to spontaneously create beloved objects that turn into killing machines. The first novel by writer and musician Blaché and Macdonald of H is for Hawk fame is shrewdly imagined, sharply crafted, witty, chilling, psychologically lush, grotesque, and romantic. Replete with poignant flashbacks and nods to the apocalyptic potential of nuclear weapons, it's kin to The Half-Life of Valery K. (2022).

DEBUT People are being put into a trance-like state while holding a beloved object, after being injected with a mysterious substance called Prophet. Attempting to separate person and object leads to death, and these nostalgic objects are starting to manifest away from their holders. Former MI6 agent Sunil Rao and his handler Lieutenant Colonel Adam Rubenstein find that they are the only people whom Prophet doesn't affect. When the nostalgic manifestations become hostile, only Rao and Rubenstein have what it takes to save the world, if only they can work through their own issues first. Unlike many sci-fi titles, the focus of the book revolves around the two main characters rather than on action sequences or futuristic technologies. This allows for plenty of mystery and drama as the story shifts between the present and the past, intertwining the two men and a substance that is making time essentially irrelevant. VERDICT Macdonald (H Is for Hawk) and Blaché's fiction debut is a low-key sci-fi mystery that blends the genres into a fusion of something new. With a hard-to-pin-down genre, the novel will appeal to a wide variety of readers.--Laura Hiatt