The Return

January 30, 2017
An artfully crafted opening line (“If the conspiracy theorists are right and it never happened, then the day it didn’t happen began innocently enough”) paves the way for an intriguing setup in Helmreich’s debut novel of humankind’s first encounter with alien intelligence. The coinciding of a lunar eclipse with the winter solstice prompted television coverage that inadvertently captured live video of an alien abduction in California. The victim, “washed-up celebrity physicist” Dr. Andrew Leland, who had been retained to provide expert commentary on the celestial event, was seen lifted up into the sky by an unseen force emanating from a green structure. Almost seven years later, Leland is found wandering in a desert, but he denies knowing anything about the abduction, claiming that he retired from scientific research and has spent those years working as a farmhand. Brilliant young physicist Shawn Ferris becomes obsessed with learning the truth about what happened to Leland. The plot takes some clever turns, though the ending doesn’t quite live up to the beginning, and Helmreich’s characters are satisfyingly multidimensional.

March 15, 2017
On the day his disappearance into the sky was captured on live television, Andrew Leland was a washed-up physicist, having traded in his controversial scientific theories for Hollywood-style self-promotion. Obsessions with the broadcast led to a renewed interest in astrophysics across the globe as governments shifted funding into scientific research and defense, hoping to discover how Leland had been abducted and by whom. Shawn Ferris was one of the obsessed, a student focusing on Leland's work, with his obsession renewed six years, seven months, and 22 days later when Leland returned to Earth just as abruptly as he had vanished. Shawn's obsession eventually led to a correspondence exchange, the revelation of a clandestine government organization, and fleeing across the country with Leland. The main characters, both geniuses, make all too human mistakes that push the story along in unexpected directions. Helmreich combines just enough science with thrilling action to keep the reader hooked on this story while pondering the greater meaning of Leland's abduction and the sparse memories of his time off-planet.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)