Diamonds to Dust (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781951214593)

Jennifer Carson is a physics graduate student who convinces a lab technician at her university, Hampton Wade, that she's from another dimension and needs his help to return. Jennifer is beautiful, but from another universe? Hampton is attracted enough to suspend his disbelief. But where will he get the diamonds needed to power her purported "transfer machine"?

Seeking Diamonds, Hampton turns to Youkoumian, a self-styled Armenian who owns a diamond store on Philadelphia's Jeweler's Row. Hampton doesn't know that Youkoumian's jewelry store is also a hawala (a system for transferring money traditionally used in the Muslim world) for jihadist organizations. The store is being investigated by the United States for having black powder and sponsoring H1-B visas for couriers traveling to and from the Middle East.

As Hampton gets in over his head, agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) converge to investigate. But in this cinematic thriller, everyone is pretending to be something they're not.

Michael DeMeis attended Stanford University as an undergraduate and achieved a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics with departmental honors. He then enrolled at Harvard and earned a Ph. D. in Physics. He initially worked at Sarnoff labs in Princeton NJ and has spent most of his career as a software engineer on systems for semiconductor device producers. His real passion, however, has been writing fiction and this resulted in his first novel "Diamonds to Dust" which features Physics memes driving the plot.