Greg Iles

Dark Matter is the title this novel carries in Britain and Australia; in America it is The Footprints of God, published in 2003. Either way it is a chase: a Duke ethicist attached to a secret government computing project runs after his colleague dies suddenly, convinced the machine being built is not what its funders say. Greg Iles lives in Natchez, Mississippi, and most of his other work stays in that country, particularly the Penn Cage novels and the Natchez Burning trilogy about a civil rights era killing that nobody was ever charged with. He was badly hurt in a road crash in 2011 and lost part of a leg, and spent the recovery rewriting the trilogy.