First Pages Friday: ALL CRY CHAOS

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First Pages Fridays offers a taste of an author's book—from ones long on the shelves to those newly launched, because while you can't judge a book by the cover, you can tell plenty from the first pages.

Thriller All Cry Chaos by Len Rosen turns on the death of a mathematician who studies patterns in nature—for instance, the similarities one finds when observing lightning, tree limbs, sidewalk cracks, and veins in the human body. Aside from solving a whodunit, the main character, Interpol agent Henri Poincaré, meditates upon a question: If there are patterns in nature, is there a Pattern Maker?

Nothing to do but walk. He turned his collar up, hands thrust deep into his jacket, and roamed the streets of the old city. He was hours at it. He walked through the old Saint Just and Saint Irenee quarters, the former necropolis. He sought out the old places, the traboules, the narrow, covered passageways built so many centuries ago, which Claire adored. He walked through neighborhoods that layered Renaissance palaces upon medieval bulwarks upon Roman baths, past the fountains and shuttered markets, up the cobbled streets and familiar alleys until he stopped, finally, before the Cathedral of Saint Jean.

When Etienne and his family visited from Paris, Poincaré would take the twins and Chloe on walks that would often as not end in the nave of Saint Jean, where they would sit as quietly as children could, contemplating the vast empty spaces and stained glass until the sun set. At six, Emile and Georges were young for religious sentiment; but like their grandfather they were drawn to the vaulted darkness of cathedrals. Chloe, by contrast, sat listening as if she heard spirits conversing in the shadows. The four would sit on simple caned chairs and, by unspoken agreement, not stir until the red of the apostles' robes winked and went dark—at which point the squeals of Papi, ice cream! would coax from Poincaré what no house of worship, on its own, ever had: a prayer.

He walked inside. Though he had tried over the years, he never understood Claire's faith. He attended church occasionally because she asked and because he was comforted, for her, as she slipped a hand into his when the priest, in defiance of orders from Rome, reverted to the Latin mass. She had insisted Etienne be baptized, and

he agreed though he thought the ceremony little more than voodoo. How surprised he was, then, at the emotions rising in him when the priest offered a blessing and sprinkled holy water on the forehead of his son. That some could consider water holy; that Etienne, who was holy in Poincaré's sight, would be blessed by another in the name of mysteries larger than them all; that this sacrament could take place in a cathedral built when oxcarts plied the muddy streets of Lyon; that his wife and her family, without embarrassment, could welcome Etienne into a fellowship two thousand years old; that he, Poincaré, a rank non-believer, could be moved so nearly to tears at the ceremony that he forced himself to turn away, sharply, in search of control—all this stood as evidence to a single fact: that Henri Poincaré was a man who longed to believe, a man who was moved by mystery and beauty but a man for whom belief was impossible. He was too much a scientist, ever the investigator in a world bound up in webs of cause and effect that had served him well in every regard save one: that at the hour between dusk and darkness, when the sky slid from deepest cobalt into night, he suspected something large, momentous even, was out there just beyond his reach, the shape of which flashed into his awareness now and again but vanished whenever he tried to grasp it.

He stood and nodded to a priest, whose footsteps clicked in the great silence. He had time enough to return home and shower before catching a train south. There was time, yet, before he would face the ones he loved to explain the chaos that he, in an effort to do a difficult job well, had heaped upon their innocent heads. What would he say? He thought of the man in the old story who had wept himself dry and, in the process, filled a lake with his tears. A child of the district woke the next morning and approached the man: "Monsieur," she said, "this is a wonder. Why are you sad?"

Seeing the goodness in her, he told the truth: "Because life is so sweet."

The child tugged at his sleeve. "Monsieur, I don't understand."

And the man, weeping anew, said: "Neither do I."

 

 

Leonard Rosen is a best-selling and widely respected non-fiction author among educational publishers (including Pearson, Allyn & Bacon, Little Brown, and Nelson Doubleday). He has written Radio Essays broadcast by NPR's Morning Edition, Only A Game, and All Things Considered, as well as op-eds published by the Boston Globe. He has taught writing at Bentley University and Harvard University. He lives in Brookline, MA.  His debut novel All Cry Chaos (The Permanent Press, September 2011), the first installment of the Henri Poincaré series, is being published in five languages and as an Audiobook.  Visit and leave a comment at www.lenrosenonline.com.

All Cry Chaos is available electronically via Kindle, IBook, Nook, and MOBI; print publication is scheduled for September 2011 (The Permanent Press).