Thriller ‘Shift’ melds JFK and LSD

The book, the first in a trilogy, opens with a seemingly prophetic sequence that takes place in 2012 — a heavy-handed device to foreshadow coming installments. Kring introduces Melchior, a rogue operative just returned from Cuba in November 1963 after his failed attempt to assassinate Castro with an exploding cigar.

Melchior, we learn, is part of a group of agents who trained under the Wiz, a special-ops guru who plucked his charges from orphanages at an early age and trained them in the dark art of espionage.

The agent’s latest task is to trail the government’s newest drug-enhanced soldier, Chandler Forrestal, whose training begins without his knowledge when a massive dose of LSD is slipped into his drink by prostitute Naz Haverman. But Naz is not your average escort — she’s been hired in the past to execute just such druggings. This time, however, she decides to dose herself along with the mark, beginning a multiday trip in which she and Chandler somehow fall hopelessly in love.

When he finally snaps out of his epic hallucination, Chandler realizes that the LSD has interacted with his brain chemistry, allowing him to not only access regions of his mind he never knew existed, but also to read the thoughts of others. He doesn’t completely grasp the magnitude of his powers, so he and Naz travel to Millbrook, N.Y., to discuss the situation with the head proponent of LSD, Timothy Leary, who purports the existence of the “Orphic Gate in the human brain,’’ behind which lies the possibility of “an ethereal bond linking consciousnesses the mental equivalent of a radio wave, needing only a receiver tuned to the right frequency to allow for instantaneous communication a thousand times clearer than mere words and gestures could ever convey.’’