Thursday, June 9, 2016

Fertile Ground

So I have not been very impressed with Ben Mezrich's writing in the two previous books I read by him, Once Upon a Time in Russia (ostenisbly non-fiction), and Seven Wonders (fiction). Nevertheless, I went through ILL to get two more of his fiction books because the plots sounded so intriguing and I think this one and The Carrier are much better edited and, therefore, more readable. They are both science/ medicine based mysteries, a la Robin Cook.
This book brings together what are initially unrelated events in Boston: a dramatically increased rate of infertility among men, a series of fatally hemorrhagic young victims to the hospital ER, an explosion in a fertility lab, and a mutilation and murder of a resident in the same ER. Our protagonists are a fertility researcher, Jake Foster, who is married to ER doctor, Brett Foster.  Both have stumbled upon a new protein that, when downloaded into the GenBank database, show a strange video of a chimp choosing random objects all marked with the letter G. Moreover, right before their deaths, Jake's lab assistant who died in the explosion, and Brett's resident who was murdered, accessed this web site. Apparently someone is trying to reveal something and someone else is trying to make sure that secret stays hidden.
This all revolves around a corporation that is working on a synthetic pheromone to make people buy their products. The end of free will is only the most obvious of the problems with this being implemented. Because the company also knows there are serious side effects of this compound that the company considers acceptable costs, reasoning along the lines of tobacco companies who kept selling their product even when they knew cigarettes caused cancer. Jake and Brett need to be silenced before they blow the upcoming corporate buy-out, and they turn to the only person they think can help them stop this murderous campaign, the state's attorney general. But he really wants to eventually run for president, and...well you know what's coming.

No comments: