Details
Synopsis
A woman scientist unwittingly happens upon a genetic conspiracy orchestrated by a biotech company, right-wing politicians, and her research institute.
| Size | | Length: | 422 pages | | Height: | 9.8 in | | Width: | 6.8 in | | Thickness: | 1.5 in | | Weight: | 24.0 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: ""A heat wave lay over Baltimore like a shroud, the leafy suburbs were cooled by a hundred thousand lawn sprinklers, but the affluent inhabitants stayed inside with the air-conditioning on full blast. On North Avenue, listless hookers hugged the shade and sweated under their hairpieces, and the kids on the street corners dealt dope out of the pockets of baggy shorts. It was late summer, but fall seemed a long way off.""
Industry Reviews
Cloning and multiplying have seized the collective creative imagination, and lately there seems to be a double behind every lamp-post. Follett, whose Key to Rebecca (1980) ranks among the best thrillers ever, now weighs in with a saga that resounds with contemporary themes, tremendous characters, and a plot that puts high energy back into the doppelg?nger tradition. With a multiplier effect that registers booming numbers on the Richter scale of thrillers, Follett creates a young scientist who starts out to prove a point in the hoary debate of nurture vs. nature. As her computer program shuffles through huge databases tracking down twins raised apart, she stumbles on a secret cloning experiment that has let loose eight "twins," three of whom become intimate subjects in her study. The patina of glamorous biotech science is vigorously burnished by the oils of lust for sex and power. This is a surefire multiple-copy purchase for most libraries. Barbara Conaty, Library of Congress
Breitman
After three consecutive historical sagas (A Dangerous Fortune, etc.), Follett returns to the threshold of the 21st century with a provocative, well-paced and sensational biotech-thriller about the genetic manipulation of human embryos. Striving to prove that offspring genetically predisposed toward aggression can learn to sublimate their combative nature through childhood conditioning by socially responsible parents, a feisty and brilliant young university researcher, Jeannie Ferrami, develops software to identify identical twins who have been reared apart. When she stumbles across what seems to be an impossibility identical twins born to different mothers at separate locations on different dates, Jeannie runs into serious trouble. Pitted against her is, foremost, her own faculty mentor, Berrington Jones, a world-renowned authority on biotechnical engineering. In devious partnership with another scientist and a bigoted U.S. senator with presidential aspirations, Jones is co-founder of Genetico, a small company that pioneered biogenetic research. The trio is now in the final stages of a lucrative friendly buyout by a corporate giant and they don't take kindly to Jeannie's diggings. Multiples created by genetic manipulation aren't new to thrillers (e.g., Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil), but Follett puts a clever spin on the concept. And despite entwining outlandish plot strands of biotechnical skullduggery, a neo-Nazi candidate for president, academic politics and corporate greed with a steamy romance between Jeannie and one of the twins, the novel shines with the authenticity that's Follett's trademark as it explores the Internet and the mind-boggling data banks of personal statistics maintained by insurance empires, the Pentagon and the FBI. This isn't Follett's most sophisticated novel it's heavy on the melodrama and on sexual violence but its wicked narrative energy and catchy theme will likely propel it quickly onto the charts. Major ad/promo; ...
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