"TELL us where you get your ideas!" we demand of the talented and interesting writer. "Oh, the imagination on you! How do you do it?" He demurs, disclaims, and we note a modest fluffing-up of authorial plumage. He knows how wonderful he is. But good prose is so much less of a mystery, finally, so much less of a shock, than bad prose. Good prose, after all, relates to our shared essence: we know it when we read it, we assent to it, we get it. Bad prose, on the other hand, is arrestingly weird. It stops the clocks and twists the wires. It knits the brow in perplexity: What the hell is this? What's going on here? I was brought up short, for example, very early in Matthew Pearl's latest novel, "The Technologists," by the following line: "Incredulously, the captain extended his spyglass." I wavered and then stopped. How does one incredulously extend a spyglass? And what else can one do incredulously? incredulously, they cut down the hanged man. . . . Incredulously, she flossed her perfect teeth. . . . Incredulously, the reviewer contemplated the latest book from the best-selling author of "The Dante Club" and "The Last Dickens," whose literarily flavored historical novels have been published in 40 countries. . . . To the narrative, anyway: The year is 1868, and the captain is incredulously extending his spyglass in the direction of Boston Harbor, where a disaster is unfolding. Schooners and pleasure steamers and barks, their compass needles all awhirl, are crashing into one another and sinking. Some malignancy has fritzed the instruments! A couple of days later, on State Street in Boston's busy financial quarter, all the windows spontaneously melt. And not just the windows - clock faces, tumblers: "The glass lenses in his eyeglasses sank into his eye sockets and left him flailing." Panic in the streets. A nasty stockbroker, behaving rather like the Duke brothers at the climax of "Trading Places," barges through the plebs, crying: "My assets! Out of my way!" Two bizarre and terrible irruptions, two sets of unexplained phenomena. The metropolis is clearly under siege - but by whom or what? And what will happen next? Enter the Technologists, an A-Team of students, informally convened, from the newly established Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here I began to enjoy myself. Pearl has clearly wallowed in his research, and "The Technologists" is pretty good on the societal and cultural forces arrayed against the fledgling M.I.T. Tribunes of the Industrial Revolution, warriors of enlightenment, pushing back the darkness with their inventions, its students and faculty are blackguarded left and right. The Harvard swells mock them for their closeness to the factory floor; the workers, who fear automation, throw tomatoes at them. ("Technology will bring God's wrath!") And the city fathers, hating their Darwinism - "the despicable teaching that we are descended from monkeys" - and un-Christian newfangledness, conspire against them. "Over there," one graybeard rumbles, "they will teach atheist machinists and the sons of farmers alike. The knowledge of science in such individuals cannot fail to lead to quackery and dangerous social tendencies." Do you hear a whisper of "The Da Vinci Code" in all this? I fancy I do. The crusty hierarchy hoarding its secrets, the gnostic devotion to Truth - thanks to Dan Brown, these things are in the DNA of the modern historical-thriller blockbuster. The archenemy in "The Technologists" is the one they call "the experimenter": the entity responsible for the colliding ships in Boston Harbor and the melted eyeglasses on State Street. The Technologists have pegged him for a rogue scientist, a trickster with test tubes, and slowly, by trial and error, they draw a bead on him. They must stop him, for he represents Science's shadow: a magus-like manipulator of matter, in the service not of knowledge but of fear. There is romance, there are fisticuffs. Laboratories explode. The manliest of the Technologists is haunted by his memories of the Civil War. "Say, what puts you in such a brown study this morning? That little social call yesterday from the men in blue?" Somebody says that You see the elements assembling. What we have in "The Technologists" is basically a ripping yarn with some war-of-ideas apparatus and plenty of period furniture, the whole accompanied by a distracting space-junk drone of bad writing. Like this: "Entering the college's study room, Marcus and Frank were preemptively hushed by a table of students in the corner before they even said anything." And this: "He lifted his hand to his hat, but she simply looked the other way with a crimson bloom tainting her pale cheeks." Now that's Victorian melodrama - Victorian pornography, almost. In a more ironic text, or one more aware of the possibility of pastiche, it might work; but Pearl appears to be using his 19th-century setting as a license to write extra-badly. Did I mention that "The Technologists" is nearly 500 pages long? There is a type of reader, I think, who likes to munch, munch, munch his way through a book like this. Not for him the dazzling compression, or the spark of novelty leaping from synapse to synapse - just a steady, satisfying rumination of printed matter. I don't mean to be rude: my own taste for shorter and flashier books is probably explained by the many hours of Donkey Kong I played in my youth. The point is that if the reader described above, and a sufficient number of readers like him, are alerted to the existence of "The Technologists," Matthew Pearl will have another great success. If not, not. James Parker writes the Entertainment column for The Atlantic.

In a departure from his three previous novels, Pearl explores the early history of MIT. In 1868, the institute's first senior class nears graduation when ships in Boston harbor inexplicably plow into each other, causing massive damage and injury. Meanwhile, vendettas are born between Harvard and MIT when a fear of science is spread citywide by Harvard scholars infuriated by what they see as academic posing by their inferiors. Increasingly deadly events put MIT in the figurative dog house with the police. Pearl's signature complex plotting, strewn with red herrings and populated with unlikely villains, leaves readers as shocked and intrigued as the Bostonians. Dialogue evocative of the nineteenth century showcases well-researched period details but slows the pace, as MIT students engage in florid conversations. Still, Pearl's latest will certainly appeal to fans of leisurely paced, smart historical thrillers like Caleb Carr's The Alienist (1994) and Jed Rubenfeld's The Death Instinct (2011). HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Pearl's first three novels The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, and The Last Dickens were all New York Times best-sellers. His latest, another literary-historical thriller, seems certain to join the elite club.--Baker, Jen Copyright 2010 Booklist

The Last Dickens, 2009, etc.) latest, an improbable but entertaining yarn of weird science. Marcus Mansfield is trying to adjust to life as a civilian following years in a Confederate prison. He is a diffident and cautious fellow: "He did not volunteer for the war to be a hero, nor to change the world, either, but did think it was the best thing a man could do." He also wants to be left alone, having applied for a night watchman's job for the solitude and instead finding work in a dark corner of a machine shop, where he puts his talents to use designing things that are much ahead of their time. In a Boston scarcely bigger than a suburb today, he draws the attention of the head of a new school on the Back Bay along "surroundings that were grandly artificial, where the pupils would observe the way in which civil engineers could turn malodorous swamp...into a landscape of wide streets." All this comes just in time for the chase at hand, for someone has in turn been sabotaging the shipping in Boston's busy harbor, turning compasses upside down and sending freighters and schooners plowing into the docks at crazy angles. It's up to Mansfield and a team of proto-geeks at MIT to figure out what sort of devious soul would want to make like a whale and wreak Moby-Dick's vengeance on the good brahmins of Beacon Hill--and while the answer, which takes a good long time in coming, isn't in the least bit predictable, it also makes sense once it comes into focus. Marcus' enthusiasm for the chase is delightful--"We'll need Tech's best physicist on hand, of course!"--as is Pearl's appreciation for both 19th-century science and technology and affection for Beantown and its history. Of appeal to fans of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films, as well as aficionados of a good adventure layered with batteries, transformers and navigational tools.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Set in 1868 Boston, the latest historical fiction from Pearl (The Dante Club) finds protagonist Marcus Mansfield on the cusp of graduation from the newly formed Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studies intently, spies on the Catholic girls' school, and fights Harvard's unfriendly rowing team. Life at the school is upended after a strange set of calamities takes place. In foggy Boston Harbor, ships collide, and all the glass in the city's central commercial district suddenly liquefies, maiming and killing Bostonians. The police are at a loss, not sure if these are crimes at all. Harvard's best-and mostly incompetent-minds are enlisted to solve the crime, leaving Mansfield and his friends no option but to form a secret club and solve the mystery themselves. In order to do so, they must contend with a scarred man, Harvard's satanic Medical Faculty (Med Fac) club, and antiscience trade unionists. Lighter than his previous novels, Pearl again blends detective fiction with historical characters (such as pioneering feminist and MIT-trained scientist Ellen Swallow), and his cast reads like a who's who of 19th-century Boston. The novel is lighter than some of Pearl's previous work, but still great fun to read. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Pearl's faultless fourth historical mystery centers on Boston in the late 1860s and the newly founded college that will become the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Three male students from different class backgrounds and the institution's sole female student team up to research a series of scientific mysteries baffling the Boston police. As part of MIT's first secret society, the Technologists, the students use chemicals, experiments, and such inventions as a primitive submarine to track a murderer whose abilities and education seem to parallel their own. The Technologists race to stay ahead of the police while dueling with their Harvard rivals and fending off antagonism from the trade unionists, who resent MIT's role in mechanizing factories. VERDICT Pearl has a special talent for making likable detectives out of historical figures (The Dante Club) and for pulling compelling plotlines from biographies (The Poe Shadow; The Last Dickens). Here, MIT and Harvard are brought to the foreground and so well depicted that they become historical characters in their own right. This thriller won't disappoint Pearl's many fans. [Library and academic marketing; on December 5 the publisher released an e-original short story as a tie-in to this novel.-Ed.]-Catherine Lantz, Morton Coll. Lib., Cicero, IL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.