Orfeo tells the story of 70-year-old avant-garde composer Peter Els, whose home experiments in biohacking musical patterns into a bacterial human pathogen, Serratia marcescens, have attracted the worried hazmat-suit-level attention of Homeland Security.
The novel begins and ends in the winter of 2011, from the accidental discovery by the authorities that Els was doing home genetic experiments to his flight across the country.
They move to Boston where she starts a career at a prestigious private school, while Els settles for being a watchman at an art museum and stay-at-home father.
But shortly before the premiere, the Waco siege ends in a massacre, and Els is sickened, whereas the media, the opera company, Bonner, and potential attendees find the coincidence exciting.
They chat in a friendly manner, but the home laboratory set up disturbs the police officers, and the next day two agents from the "Joint Security Agency" pay a visit.
They ask technical questions, learn how he assembled everything on the cheap, and decide to take the precaution of confiscating his incubator, entirely unconcerned about issues of legality.
The next day, after a pre-dawn early jog, he heads back home and finds a media circus has popped up while biohazard teams strip his house, even unburying his dog.
Upset, he considers his options, and decides to teach his scheduled weekly music appreciation class at a local retirement home without cleaning up.
Els hears the arrival of numerous security forces, and takes a glass bud vase, shaped like a chemistry flask.
Police assumed his home laboratory was suspicious, and called in the FBI, leading to charges of bioterrorism and mail and wire fraud.
[1] Powers, in an earlier visit to Stanford, spent time assisting in the laboratory of biochemist Aaron Straight, which helped shape the details of Els' DIY lab.
Elizabeth Sile, in Esquire, wrote that "Powers proves, once again, that he's a master of the novel with Orfeo", while David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times called the book "magnificent and moving".