Enter Lieutenant Colonel Adam Rubenstein of the US Special Forces and Sunil Rao, a decadent, British-educated Indian man with former lives as an art and jewellery appraiser and MI6 agent, his suitability for which derives from a subtle superpower: Rao can tell a lie from the truth, what is fake from what is real.

Rao and Rubenstein begin as reluctant partners on the case; we learn via tense flashbacks that they previously worked together as operatives in Uzbekistan. But sure enough, as pages of turned-up clues and judo-chopped henchmen flick by, our reluctant globe-trotting detectives fall into raillery and even bromance. And yet, far from the narrow view of masculinity to which the buddy genre is normally shackled, MacDonald and Blaché paint an expansive and moving picture of male relationships that uncouples traditional treatments of identity in popular fiction, all still within a wonderfully pulp frame. Indeed, it is easy to see how primed Prophet is for progressive adaptation to the screen, ideally – in this reviewer’s mind – directed by Rian Johnson, star-ring Dave Bautista as the burly Rubenstein and Dev Patel as the chaotic Rao.

With the ultimate narrative cheat code – Rao’s uncanny ability to discern truth – at their disposal, MacDonald and Blaché bypass much of the routine exposition and tiresome side missions that can weigh such novels down. As Rubenstein observes:

Rao’s knack for zeroing in on a person’s vulnerabilities, coupled with his extraordinary talent, his knowledge of the truth, makes Rao one of the most important intelligence assets in the world. Espionage rests on trust … on leverage, on betrayal, and Rao’s existence breaks the whole system.

The pair makes short work of an otherwise convoluted conspiracy, arriving eventually at a facility in Aurora, Colorado. Here they discover how the incident on the NATO airbase involved accidental exposure to a bioweapon, the eponymous Prophet, a virus-like substance that induces lethal nostalgia in its host, the curious symptoms of which include blissful stupor and a supernatural ability to conjure replicas of cherished childhood objects out of thin air. As our heroes edge closer to the entity behind the nefarious innerworkings of Prophet, they become increasingly entangled with the clandestine project’s stakes, and matters turn more Christopher Nolanesque, or, as Rao would have it, ‘more Twilight Zone’.

At this point in the novel’s latter half, those inclined towards nitpicking might find narrative threads to pluck at, unwinding the fabric of the text. But as its world building and internal logic stretch to their limits, so too its more captivating features are exposed. Beneath its blockbuster veneer, Prophet is a deceptively cerebral novel. As the plot ventures into more mind-bending, psychological terrain, continuity and consistency are not so much discarded as relegated beneath the more interesting aspects of the novel. For MacDonald and Blaché, it is clear the (b)romantic connection between Rubenstein and Rao drives the story; but it is through them, particularly their banter-filled dialogues, that larger questions concerning the nature of reality also arise. Rao’s supernatural ability might appear a crude and reductive shortcut along such lines of enquiry, but it his counterpart in Rubenstein, for whom he suffers a curious blind spot, that draws out the more philosophical, or more precisely epistemological, positions.

More strikingly, towards the denouement, as the nostalgia-inducing Prophet wreaks havoc, this pacey novel provides an extensive critique of nostalgia itself. As a central organising feature of the text, or ‘novum’ as the cultural critic Darko Suvin would have it, the substance Prophet and how it affects its hosts comes to stand as a warning, albeit an ambivalent one, about the regressive temptations of nostalgia, particularly at a time when we face an uncertain social and planetary future. As Rubenstein ponders: ‘There must be something about Prophet that seeks out the part inside you that yearns for safety … Some kind of lure. A light to entice, an escape. An escape that’s a trap.’