SOLVED. Thriller about Nobel prize, blackmail, missing daughter, murder [s]

[Ruzza]

Hi. I read this book about 5-6 years ago and it was a paperback. The book was older but not by more than 10 years. The paperback I read was a translation but I think the original version is in english. I know for sure that the author has more books in this genre.

Ok so this is a little complicated I hope I don't mess up the description of the novel.

There is this guy lets call him F(for father). F is a single father, he has a daughter, the wife died a few years back. So F is one of the Noble prize judges or smt related to the Nobel prize.

F has a brother in law(wife's brother) let's call him B.
B is in prison for company espionage, he was hired by different people to break in into competitors offices and steal documents or reaserch or whatever. B and his sister were really close, and B didn't really like F.

Anyway B has only a few days left of his sentence when F commes to visit and tells him that his daughter was kidnapped and that the kidnapper wants F to vote and influence the other people of the Nobel prize jury to vote for a certain candidate(lets call her N) to win the Nobel prize in exchange for his daughter release. The problem is that the Nobel prize ceremony/anoncement of the winner is still weeks away and F can't guarentee that he can get the necesary votes to save his daughter. F asks B that when he gets out to look for the daughter.
I remember bits and pices from this point until the final chapters. I remembet a colegue of F(also in the jury) is injured or killed, I want to say he was poisoned. I rememeber B breaking into a building to get some kind of info and also I think that B talks or watches from afar a former girlfriend and I think that he has a child with this ex but I'm not sure about this. What I remember clearly was when B was breakin into a building he was having this monologue in his head about how everyone was so concerned about hackers breaking into their computers/systems that they weren't keeping important documents and research on computers anymore but instead reverted to having paper copies kept in high security volts and that made his job so much easier.
I remember that at every step that B made in his atempt to find his niece something went wrong. I want to say that at some point he gets shot at but not actually wounded.


Ok now to the final chapters, major spoilers ahead:
(view spoiler)[ The Nobel prizes were anounced, in the end N won the Nobel prize but the daughter wasn't returned so in a final bid to save his niece B breaks in were N works and threatens her(with a gun?) to tell him where his niece is. They have this conversation in which N makes B realise that she didn't need to do anything to assure her win since her discovery was by far the most important and a sure win for the Nobel prize. B realises that this hole time his niece's dissapereance was invented by his brother in law, and that everything that went wrong for the entire time he was searching was also because of F. I think that F was also the one who poisoned his colegue.

After he realises this B goes and confronts F. F confeses he invented all this because he was afraid of what B would do when he got out of prison and came to visit only to find the daughter gone. It turns out that the daughter ran away and was living with her grandmother because F tried to molest her(he didn't succed). F was apparently obsessed with his late wife and when the daughter grew up she resembled her mother very much so one night he attacked her, she fought him off and then the next day ran away.

I can't remember what happened after this. I know there was at least one more chapter. (hide spoiler)]

Thank you and please excuse my grammar and spelling mistakes. :)
Also I couldn't think of a better title for this post, if anyone has a better idea, I'm open to suggestions :)

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

Is this a science Nobel? Chemistry, biology, medicine, physics, something else?

What country do F and his daughter and presumably B live in?

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

I changed the header, if I got anything wrong just yodel. Sounds much more like a thriller than a mystery.

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

In Free Fall involves physicists, a Nobel, and blackmail, but the kidnapped child is a boy.

Sounds good, I might have to read it....

A scholarly dispute over the nature of the universe erupts in kidnapping and murder in this gripping, high-toned philosophical thriller.Ever since they were in school together, studying physics under the tutelage of the improbably nicknamed Little Red Riding Hood, Sebastian and Oskar have held fundamentally different views of the world. Oskar, now a big-shot physicist in Geneva who preaches the single-answer theory that holds that things are as they are and not otherwise, is chasing the Nobel Prize through his labors to unite quantum physics with the general theory of relativity. Sebastian, an experimental nanotechnologist at the University of Freiburg, is a proponent of the Many-Worlds Interpretation in which the Big Bang engendered countless parallel universes where things can both be and not be the case at the same time. When Sebastian married Maike, an artists' agent and gallery owner, Oskar made no secret of his verdict that Sebastian was settling for a consolation prize. Now that their son Liam is ten years old, he sneers that everything on earth that matters to Sebastian bears his surname. The day after Sebastian accepts Oskar's challenge to debate their positions on a live TV program broadcast from Mainz, he's driving Liam to camp when his car disappears with his sleeping son inside. By the time the empty car is returned, Sebastian has received a ransom demand that names a horrific price. Even after he complies with the kidnappers' demand and feels that the catastrophe has passed, his life enters a precipitous free fall that tangles his fate with that of dour murder-squad detective Rita Skura and her old mentor, Detective Chief Superintendent Schilf, who's teetering on the edge of death and love.

[Ruzza]

Yeah, I knew it wasn't mistery but the word thriller didn't come to me then :))). Thanks for the title.

I think the Nobel prize was in chemistry, biology or medicine, I'm not sure which. I want to say that the original country was Sweden but I think the brother in law traveled to other countries as well.

[Ruzza]

Lobstergirl wrote: "In Free Fall involves physicists, a Nobel, and blackmail, but the kidnapped child is a boy.

Sounds good, I might have to read it....

A scholarly dispute over the nature of the univ..."

No definitely not the book, it was a girl that was kidnaped for sure.

The author was a guy and he had lots of thriller novels, I know this because I looked at his wikipedia page. I read 2 more from him but I can't remember the plot of the other 2 novels. I borrowed all three books from a friend and she doesn't have them anymore and can't remember the author either.

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

What did the cover/covers look like? Abstract or realistic, photos of people, buildings, what colors, etc.

[Ruzza]

I'm not really sure. I think it was adark blue cover, but I can't remember more about it. Sorry :(

[Ruzza]

bump

[Kirstin]

Could it be The Prize by Irving Wallace? It seems to fit some of the criteria but not all.

[Ruzza]

Kirstin wrote: "Could it be The Prize by Irving Wallace? It seems to fit some of the criteria but not all."

Thanks for the answer, but it's not it.

[Ruzza]

I found it!!!! My friend remembered that the name in romanian was literarly The Nobel Prize and searched for it that way. :))))
I was so sure it had to have another name. Anyway it's Der Nobelpreis by Andreas Eschbach. I don't think it was translated into english :(. I thought the original was in english beacause I remembered reading his wikipedia page in english. So sorry for missleading you.

[Kris]

Great, thanks for the update Ruzza.

[Ruzza]

Thanks for moving it to solved. Just realised I didn't do this :)

[Kris]

No worries. A moderator will always be available to do that.