Greg Iles' latest thriller, The Footprints Of God, isn't artfully written or craftily plotted, but it has a provocative premise and an extended chase scene almost exciting enough to overcome the pervasive sloppiness. In fact, most of the book is a chase scene, starting with the opening chapter, in which protagonist David Tennant flees his North Carolina home to escape what he believes to be round-the-clock government surveillance. Tennant runs into the Tennessee woods, then a D.C. mall and the holy sites of Jerusalem, before stopping at a New Mexico military base, where he argues with a super-powered villain over the ultimate fate of mankind. Tennant is a medical ethicist, assigned by the president to comment on the ramifications of developing a codebreaking computer powerful enough to be called "artificial intelligence." But research-team members who ask questions tend to end up dead, and the naturally paranoid Tennant finds himself on the lam with his psychiatrist (and love interest) Rachel Weiss in tow, ducking assassins who mysteriously anticipate his every move. Iles is a best-selling author in the Michael Crichton mold, funneling hot-button social and science issues into sketchy page-turners that leave readers with some moral quandaries to chew over after they've bookmarked and gone to bed. But the sketchy part is the problem: Iles' musings on the relationship between human creation and divine creation as relates to "thinking" machines deserve to be highlighted in a narrative as intelligent and surprising as the ideas it contains. The Footprints Of God feels rushed and under-imagined, with functionally one-dimensional characters and straightforward, unlayered dialogue and action. Double-crosses and reader fake-outs don't pop up much until the end, when the multiple shifts in loyalty seem unmotivated. Worse, Iles mostly forgoes the artful passages of descriptive prose that may seem like a luxury for potboilers, but which give needed substance to action. Instead, Iles falls back on clumsy shorthand, as he compares characters and situations to those in other books and movies. ("Think Big Brother," Tennant says when describing a government agency. Two pages later, he describes another character by saying, "Think Faust.") Tennant's impossible escapes are tense and entertaining, but it's hard to care much about a man on the run when his path remains so indistinct.