The Law of Attraction

The Law of Attraction is a conspiracy thriller, romantic mystery, and meta-publishing novel about prediction, fate, manipulation, and the possibility that belief itself can alter events. Its heroine is Amy Shaw, a former Washington Post crime reporter now working as an assistant librarian at Harvard’s Widener Library while trying to sell a memoir about the murder of her father.

Amy is almost thirty, living in Cambridge with her boyfriend Nate Winthrop, an FBI Special Agent at the Boston Field Office. She has left journalism after layoffs and retreated into books, library work, coffee, and the hope that her writing might give meaning to her father’s unsolved death. Her father, Ryan Shaw, was a Notre Dame computer science professor shot years earlier near South Bend airport. The official theory was armed robbery by a drug addict. Amy has never fully accepted it.

The plot begins when Amy reads her horoscope: “someone important will re-enter your life.” That person is Joshua Knight, her ex-boyfriend from Harvard. Ten years earlier, Joshua was a brilliant computer scientist obsessed with prediction markets and the law of attraction. Amy and Joshua met at Harvard’s Manifesting Club, where he explained his idea for a platform that would let people bet on future events and thereby, perhaps, shape them. Amy gave the platform its name: Prophetic. Their relationship was brief but intense. Then Joshua vanished from Harvard without explanation, dropping out of his PhD and ghosting Amy completely. She interpreted this as romantic betrayal and rebuilt herself as a hard-nosed skeptic.