Prey

he book is narrated by Jack Forman, an unemployed software engineer turned stay-at-home dad. Jack must watch after his three kids and his increasingly abrasive wife Julia. Julia, an ambitious executive for the shadowy high-tech Xymos corporation, has recently grown more irritable, lost weight, and picked up an odd habit of not coming home for the night. Jack begins to suspect that his wife is having an affair, the reader, however, would be wise to instead hedge his or her bets that Julia's erratic behavior is due to her relationship with Xymos. Xymos has been working on a nanotechnology project for the government, which we can assume has somehow gone horribly wrong. After dealing with several mysterious events around the house (could Xymos somehow be responsible?), Jack himself is called off to the company's isolated desert manufacturing plant to reign in the errant nanomachines.