Eric Bernt, The Speed of Sound

There are a lot of moving parts in this fast-paced sci-fi novel by Eric Bernt. There are the good guys—a new doctor at a secret home for autistic savants and her genius patient Eddie, who's working on a machine that could change life forever for everyone. And then there are the various sets of bad guys who are out to get Eddie's invention for themselves. The machine, by the way, is an implausible one: The device is able to scan a room and replay sounds that were made in it at pretty much any point in the past. You just have to input the proper date to retrieve the sounds you're looking for. So, yes, the project could definitely change the course of history. There's a lot going on in the book, with the crazy science and the multiple teams of malefactors, but Bernt does a good job of keeping things from getting too confusing. My only major complaint is that the book ends very abruptly. It's the kind of ending where you turn the page and literally say aloud—I speak from experience—"That's it?" We're being set up, it turns out, to read a sequel, Bernt's The Sound of Echoes, which was published a year after this one. I liked this book enough to read a sequel one day, maybe, but it annoys me a bit that I wasn't really given closure within this book, that the story isn't finished, and if I want to know how it ends, I'd have to read book two.