Murder in the Solid State, the new McCarthy novel, is a hard-science, page-turning suspense novel of one man's battle to save his life, career and country in twenty-first century America. David Sanger is an ambitious young physicist. He is about to present a groundbreaking paper on nanotechnology at a conference in Baltimore. At the opening cocktail party, an elderly scientist, the grand old man of nanotechnology himself, Otto Vandegroot, takes offense at a sly insult and draws his hi-tech collapsible sword. Someone hands David a sword, which he doesn't know how to use, but he wins using street-fighting skills, shaming the older man in public. At the crack of dawn the next morning David is wakened by the police. Vandegroot's body has been found stabbed with the sword David discarded after the fight. And David, who escapes incarceration only with the help of a loyal friend (and lawyer), finds himself in such big trouble that he has to disappear and go underground to save his life - because the political implications of David's nanotech discovery are so large that some people are willing to kill to suppress it.