Synopsis
Dr. Sylvia Strange - forensic psychiatrist and expert on criminal sexuality - returns in a thrilling new suspense novel and comes head-to-head with a terrifying serial killer whose weapon of choice is a poison nearly impossible to trace and, when ingested, nearly impossible to counteract. A baffling series of deaths have occurred over the span of a decade in some of the most prestigious research laboratories around the world. Now Dr. Sylvia Strange, forensic expert, and criminal profiler Edmund Sweetheart, FBI consultant, are called in to investigate what is looking like murder. Their prime suspect is Dr. Christine Palmer, a brilliant scientist whose work with scientific think tanks around the world made her one of three scientists knowledgeable about exotic neurotoxins and their antidotes. What follows is a taut and terrifying investigation, in which Sylvia finds herself able to trust no one - but herself.
Kirkus Reviews
Psychological profiler Sylvia Strange keeps matching wits against ever-more-daunting adversaries. Now, like a successful video-game heroine, she's graduated from a fictional version of the Unabomber (Dantes' Inferno, 2001) to a bioterrorist who could have stepped out of tomorrow's headlines. For several years now, somebody has been dispatching an unknown number of victims (6? 10? 15?) with a range of neurotoxins so frighteningly varied that nobody's suspected a thing-until the FBI connects the demise of Doug Thomas-a Los Alamos toxicologist who was moonlighting on some sinister scheme when he killed himself in a senseless auto collision while he was feeling no pain-to that of Samantha Grayson, a biochemical graduate assistant in London's Porton Down research center whose distraught fiancé, Paul Lang, just happens to be an analyst for British Intelligence. Before the curtain even goes up on the ensuing investigation, the somebody has already been identified as Dr. Christine Palmer, a brilliant neurotoxin researcher whose late father, Dr. Fielding Palmer, was an even more celebrated immunologist and AIDS expert. Christine, counterterrorist expert Edmond Sweetheart tells Sylvia, is one cold piece of work, a calculating, possessive, dispassionate scientist who likes to watch her victims' slow deaths up close not because she's sadistic but because she's curious. And sure enough, after a couple of singularly unrevealing rounds of investigation at Los Alamos and Porton Down, Christine, who's much too smart to leave any evidence or let the swarming authorities get under her skin, has a chance to get up close and personal with the latest victim in her sights: about-to-be-married Sylvia, who's sureshe's being poisoned but can't figure out how. A killer whose emotional remoteness is less scary than simply blank, coupled with Lovett's plodding habit of explaining everything under the sun, from the mission of MI-6 to the meaning of "angelita," makes Sylvia's fifth outing less threatening than a morning newspaper. Agent: Theresa Park/Sanford J. Greenburger