Denison is a town in upstate New York so ignored by the rest of the world it disappears. Never much of a place to begin with, especially since the button factory left, now it falls right off the space-time continuum, doesn’t even come up on Google. But as failed TV reporter and self-declared private investigator Padraig O’Toole discovers, there’s an upside. You can’t die in a place that doesn’t exist. That’s just quantum physics, nothing exists that’s unobserved, which, as O’Toole discovers when he finds his way to the town is something even the local cops discuss like the rest of us talk about the weather.

Not exactly an ideal place to solve a homicide. But O’Toole’s (maybe) murdered brother-in-law was last seen in the town, and he’s determined to track down the killer, even if, well, there can’t be one. He plunges into a phantasmagorical world of elastic time, where seasons change in an afternoon, shoot-outs don’t get anyone killed, and the cast of characters includes a media mogul hiding out to deny her sons their inheritance, her sidekick, a fugitive priest, a state bureaucrat obsessed with building a family-friendly mall in a place you can't find on a map, an angel with a weakness for Chardonnay, and God Herself, who turns out to be a petulant middle aged woman annoyed with the mess everyone’s made in this obscure corner of Her creation. All raising a fundamental question about immortality: worth the trouble?

And what about love? Padraig O’Toole discovers that may have been there all along, like Denison, if only he’d really looked.

HIDDEN VARIABLES: A QUANTUM COMEDY is a comic fantasy, a cosmic detective story about a seeker from the wrong end of the gig economy who takes a journey to the ground of being and, in the end, finds eternal life – right back where he started.   

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