Formidable Iciness

“The air smelt like an over-sweet chocolate lava cake, but it tasted clinical.”

Charlene Annaleigh Vittori, an overachieving Harvard Law School student from England, wakes up in a masquerade gown in a dark, unfamiliar space. She does not recall attending a masquerade, and realises that the beddings covering her body have sucked up all her strength. A tall, slender, athletic young man wearing sunglasses, dark suits, and black sports gloves towered over her, posing a series of questions about “the formidable, icy man” — a character from the unpublished novel she wrote two years ago that was inspired by her enigmatic college classmate Finn Wales — as well as Laurence A. Law, her Harvard Law classmate who mesmerised her to the point of addiction. In Charlene’s novel, her unnamed fictional alter ego would go on to become the first female Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court and adjudicate a highly unusual case involving “the formidable, icy man” and the Chief Justice’s college sweetheart.

What is reality, and what is fiction? Who is the man in suits, and where do we place him in Charlene’s real life or fiction? Why does the formidable, icy man continue to haunt Charlene? Can Charlene’s rationality save her from her predicament? What exactly happened at Harvard Law, where a girl in Charlene’s class was found dead in her dorm and where students from the same section received a number of bone-chilling anonymous messages soaked in hatred? …

Blending elements from law, philosophy, statistics, and physics, Formidable Iciness investigates the nature of raw ambition and irrational fear.

[Spoiler alert!] Here are some elements in Formidable Iciness:

The tensions between romance and elitism
A critical examination of the legal profession
The core principle in American criminal law: “innocent unless proven guilty”
The #MeToo Movement
Social media culture
Internationalism and foreign languages
Neuroscience, psychology, quantum mechanics, and statistics
History, literature, and theatre