The Fear Index is the latest novel by Robert Harris. Dr Alex Hoffman, a former top scientist at CERN, working on the Particle Collider, is now heading up a Geneva-based hedge fund which, thanks to one of Dr Hoffman's algorithms, makes a fortune for a very select group of international billionaires. But when a book by Charles Darwin arrives in the post, marked at a passage about fear, things start to go very wrong inside Dr Hoffmann's very privileged head.