Rousseau's Ghost

An urgent but cryptic request from Professor Ted Porter summons his old friend and former Rhodes Scholar Jack Davis to Paris. Once there Jack finds his friend dead, apparently electrocuted by a faulty laptop computer. The Parisian police rule the death an accident and close the case. But Jack well knew his friend's deep aversion to modern technology, and to computers in particular, and believes the computer was not Ted's and his death no accident. Unable to convince the police, Jack begins his own investigation, aided by Danielle, a beautiful young French woman who claims to have been Ted's research assistant and sometime lover. Sifting through Ted's notes and an unfinished manuscript titled Rousseau's Ghost, he finds a mysterious entry: "Inst Pol??!!" Not knowing what this might mean, he travels to Oxford to see his old tutor, who surmises that Ted's shorthand query refers to the Institutions Politiques, a manuscript on which Rousseau worked in the 1750s but later abandoned and burned, except for the small section we now know as the Social Contract. Could the rest of the manuscript have survived? Could Ted have found it? If so, was he murdered for his discovery? Could Jack and Danielle be next?

Publishers Weekly

Synthesizing echoes of Poe and state-of-the-art Internet issues, an unlikely plot achieves a tone of lucid, camp humanity in the fiction debut of political scientist Ball (Reappraising Political Theory). New York lawyer Jack Davis reaches Paris to find his old friend, Princeton scholar Ted Porter, dead as a result of a computer short-circuit. Knowing his friend's contempt for computers, Jack smells a rat. Teaming up with Ted's research assistant, Danielle Dupin, Jack airs his suspicions to old Christ Church Oxford tutor Sir Jeremiah Altmann. The octogenarian is equally suspicious and decodes Ted's cryptic note "Inst pol?!?!" as a reference to 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Institutions Politiques, a larger work, rumored to have been destroyed, from which Rousseau extracted only Le Contrat Social. It seems Ted's conviction that Institutions had survived may have enraged the mysterious Societe de Jean-Jacques, which is devoted to controlling the master's legacy. After a philosophical lull, the plot accelerates to a cinematic action scene, the climax of the struggle to define intellectual property. Although parts are contrived (Danielle is too much the middle-aged man's erotic fantasy, the francophobia and anglophilia naive, and the supposedly brilliant narrator's bewilderment comprehensible only as a ruse), the novel has a winning integrity. (Oct.)