GOD DOESN'T PLAY DICE, Einstein famously declared, but publishers take a gamble all the time. Especially if they think they might have a new blockbuster on their hands.

Mark Alpert was a physics graduate who decided he would prefer to write poetry and ended up in journalism instead as an editor at Scientific American, where his job is to explain bewildering ideas in terms comprehensible to the layman. Which is a kind of poetry in its own right.

Final Theory is a book that takes big science - and cosmology is as big as it gets - and weaves a populist read around it. Alpert posits that Albert Einstein, here referred to as Herr Doktor by his former students, actually achieved his life's ambition: to discover a unified theory of everything.

This final theory, which would describe the behaviour of matter, energy, gravity at the subatomic as well as the galactic scale, remains the Holy Grail of physicists such as Stephen Hawking today.

If science is the new religion, Final Theory is the new Da Vinci Code (the cover is a shameless pastiche): the background is a lot more convincing and the plot not quite so silly.

When Hans Kleinmann, one of Einstein's assistants, is tortured to the brink of death, his last request is to see his own former pupil, David Swift, a scientist turned writer very much like the author. Swift discovers that Einstein was so afraid his discovery - like the splitting of the atom - would be turned to malign military use, that he refused to reveal it, instead disclosing only some details to each of his assistants.

Now someone - a nasty ex-Soviet special forces agent turned mercenary - is determined to piece it together if he has to kill them all in the process. The FBI is also determined to get hold of the secret.

The result is an entertaining, if fairly predictable, chase, laced with murder and mayhem, in which David hooks up with his ex-girlfriend, now a physics professor, and an autistic boy with a passion for military simulation computer games.

My only reservation here is that having him use a GameBoy is a light year out of date; any kid these days would have a PSP or Nintendo DS at least.

The hard science is kept to a minimum but is strictly subservient to the action. Conclusion: a lightspeed read with not too much mass.

Final Theory by Mark Alpert
Simon & Schuster, £12.99; 368pp
Buy the book

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