Espionage tale puts LANL at heart of action

Present-day Santa Fe and Los Alamos – including Los Alamos National Laboratory – are settings for Michael Gamble’s new espionage thriller, “Zeroscape.” In an email, Gamble described the book’s main plot: “A renegade, former MIT professor Rick Adams is hired by LANL to design a devilishly challenging subsystem for the most critical program that the lab has administered in decades. Intelligence suggests that a former Soviet republic has perfected the ultimate nuclear counter weapon, a gamma ray laser.”

One subplot has Rick and the brainy femme fatale Carmen Cdebaca falling in love, though Carmen stays involved with a former lover who works at the lab.

Gamble, a former LANL physicist, discusses his new book at 1 p.m. Saturday, June 25, at Page One Bookstore, 11018 Montgomery NE. Best-selling author Douglas Preston said in a blurb that “Zeroscape” “crackles with inside knowledge, memorable characters, great science and a terrific sense of place.”

AT UNM: Sam Kean, author of “The Disappearing Spoon,” a book about the origins of the periodic table, talks at 1 p.m. Saturday, June 25, at the University of New Mexico Science and Math Learning Center, which is east of the Maxwell Museum. The book’s subtitle is “And Other True Tales of Madness, Love and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements.”

AT BOOKWORKS: When artist-author Aline Fourier was working as a psychosynthesis counselor in the 1980s, she had clients who had issues with food. Fourier said psychosynethesis uses imagery and connects emotionally with what is happening in the body.

“Some of the people were very concerned about what they were eating. They were eating organically and still they weren’t feeling well. I said, ‘You’re eating that worry, that concern, that fear,’ ” Fourier recalled. “It’s the whole idea of positive affirmation. …We’re so concerned with what’s good for us. That keeps changing. Our inner authority doesn’t.”

Fourier, who lives in Cerrillos, is the author of “Everything I Eat Nourishes Me – A Cookbook for Body & Soul.” She will discuss and sign copies of the book at 3 p.m. today at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW and serve small tea sandwiches prepared from recipes from the book, which also contains remembrances about food and people she’s gathered.

Also at Bookworks, Laurie Heusinger,an Albuquerque natural therapeutic specialist and licensed massage therapist, talks about her new book, “Toggle It!,” at 7 p.m. Friday, June 24. Heusinger discusses how she learned how to control her asthma through a series of techniques that are in the book. She developed a stress- and pain-relief system called “toggling,” which allows a person to recognize that emotions are connected with all symptoms but they can be changed and reprogrammed. … Author Emerita Romero-Anderson and illustrator Randall Pijoan present their new book, “The Milagro of the Spanish Beat Pot,” at 3 p.m. Saturday, June 25. The novel for middle readers is set in Spanish Colonial New Mexico. Its protagonist is 11-year-old Raymundo, who desperately wants his widowed mother’s cracked bean pot to be repaired. Raymundo’s only hope is Clay Woman.

IN SANTA FE: Writer Stan Biderman and photographer Kathryn Minette talk about their book “Bullet Trains to Yaks” at 6 p.m. Wednesday, June 22, at Collected Works, 202 Galisteo. The book is based on their travels across China and Tibet.

MORE IN SANTA FE: Lynne Hinton of Albuquerque discusses and signs her new novel, “Pie Town,” at 2 p.m. Saturday, June 25, at Garcia Street Books, 376 Garcia St. The book, which is set in Pie Town, N.M., centers on the simultaneous arrival of a priest and a young woman.