On the day Ricardo Alomar’s four best friends are discovered dead at the launch of their high-tech start-up company, his world is shattered.
The police can find no cause for their mysterious deaths, but as their bodies start disappearing from the morgue, Ricardo is drawn into the investigation of his friends’ strange behavior and their even stranger invention, a kind of time-displacement generator utilizing the Higgs boson — the so-called “God Particle”.
At the same time, Ricardo’s old world is vanishing, too. His father, Diego, a famous writer of post-modernist Spanish novels, has slipped into mute senility and is dying; Ricardo is in danger of losing his job, and he finds himself falling in love with his recently murdered friend’s new widow.
In tandem with a foul-mouthed, sexually harassing female cop, he discovers the secret of the God Particle machine and the startling truth behind his friends’ disappearances. But the answer is utterly unlike anything he’d ever expected.