The Hunt Hypothesis

 It’s 1964 when 13-year-old Bobby Wayne Hunt gives his Valedictory address at The Warren School, an elite prep school in Charleston, West Virginia. A coal miner’s son, Bobby escapes from a tiny company town and from a family of alcoholics and drug addicts when he is accepted at Warren, moves in with his grandparents, and enrolls in kindergarten. In his speech Bobby announces that he’s earned a full-ride academic scholarship from Columbia University to study nuclear physics. In his speech he reveals his plan to provide an inexhaustible supply of clean energy by inventing a nuclear fusion reactor to harness the power that fuels the sun. And not just power for planes, trains, and automobiles, but for the electricity grid and every other thing that needs a boost.

   Bobby blazes through 13 years of school in 8 years, always at the top of his class. Being five years younger than his classmates contributes to social issues that cause an emotional breakdown for the 11-year-old 11th grader. He’s found on his dorm room floor, barely responsive, and rushed to the hospital where a psychiatrist helps him find the courage to utilize his logic and reason to improve his socialization.
   
   Bobby’s dearest friend Becca, also a physics nut, lands at Barnard. When Bobby finally becomes a man, a love affair that for years lived only in Becca’s dreams, finally begins to bloom in Central Park over dinner at Tavern on the Green, celebrating Bobby’s completion of his PhD at 17.
   
   Meanwhile, the fusion power project is dubbed the New Manhattan Project since its genesis is in the Columbia science building where The Manhattan Project was born. The project is managed by Bobby, Becca, and a scientist from Oxford, whose grandfather is a Duke. The fossil fuel lobbyists are up in arms and the Soviets think the New Manhattan Project is a weapons program in disguise, leading to espionage in New York, Cambridge, Haight-Ashbury, and Washington, DC; and to murder and dismemberment in Istanbul.
   
   THE HUNT HYPOTHESIS, the first of a planned series, is a tale of Bobby’s first nineteen years, and is solidly grounded in historical and scientific fact, with elements of romance and thriller. The book will appeal to readers of historical fiction/romantic thriller in the style of Jeffrey Archer. Although there are many scientific works about nuclear fusion, this is a unique presentation of the subject in the context of a fictitious tale.