Deep Water - Christine Poulson

A cure for obesity is the Holy Grail of medical research. Two years after a drug trial that went horribly wrong when a participant died, Calliope Biotech is close to success in the quest for a drug that will cure obesity. When another company claims to have got there first, & takes their claim to court, patent lawyer Daniel Marchmont is employed by Calliope's entrepreneurial director, Lyle Linstrum, to scrutinize the evidence of lab books & trials when the lawyer working on the case, Jennifer Blunt, is killed in a car accident. Daniel's reservations about taking on the enormous workload of the case are complicated by the fact that Jennifer was his ex-wife, who had left him for his best friend. Now happily married to Rachel, they have a daughter, Chloe, who suffers from Diamond-Blackfan anaemia. Rachel is concerned that taking on Jennifer's case in such circumstances will revive painful memories but she's unprepared for the stress that events from the past will place on her marriage. When Daniel discovers that a vital lab book, detailing the experiments undertaken by Honor Masterman & her team, is missing, & questions are raised about Jennifer's professional competence, the car accident begins to look more sinister. When Daniel finds the missing lab book hidden in Jennifer's house, the mystery only deepens as he tries to discover why Jennifer hid the book & what impact its contents will have on the case.

Chloe's condition needs constant treatment - blood transfusions, injections - & the only hope for a cure is either a bone marrow transplant (neither Daniel or Rachel is a match) or the research that consultant paediatrician Paul O'Sullivan & his team are working on. Grant money is fast running out & researcher Katie Flanagan is under pressure to come up with publishable results that will hopefully lead to a cure for Diamond-Blackfan anaemia. Rachel is involved with the charity sponsoring the research &, after meeting her, Katie is very aware of the lives that depend on her work. That's why she's frustrated when her experiments don't seem to be producing the expected results. Katie is also aware of how important this research is for her own career. She can't stagnate at her current level forever. She needs to move on from postdoctoral research in a lab to a lectureship or permanent university post. After the sudden death of her supervisor, she was lucky to be offered a bench in Honor Masterman's lab to be able to complete her research before the grant money ran out.

Professor Honor Masterman has been touted as a future Nobel Laureate & her team, led by Will Orville, are depending on the successful outcome of the patent case; their reputations depend on it. Katie is grateful for a working space but soon becomes aware that there's something wrong at the lab. Working late at night she's aware that there's someone else there, someone who isn't written in the log book. There are also odd accidents - chemicals misplaced, the spread of radioactive contamination. There's also the puzzling non-results of Katie's experiments. A gas explosion that leaves a security guard & lab technician Ian Gladwill in hospital leaves Katie wondering if someone could be deliberately sabotaging the lab. Katie's friendship with Rachel leads to her renting the Marchmont's barge when her flat's lease runs out. She becomes involved in Daniel's case when she's able to help him interpret the crucial lab book & begins investigating, putting herself in considerable danger as reputations & a lot of money are at stake.

Deep Water is a terrific thriller. I enjoyed it as much as Christine Poulson's last novel, Invisible. I really enjoy the way that she combines a tense plot with the very personal stories of her protagonists. Daniel & Rachel's desperate search for a cure for Chloe that leads Rachel to join the board of the charity raising money for research is underpinned by the details of Chloe's ongoing treatment. Their life revolves around Chloe's needs but they're a happy couple until Jennifer's ghost brings back Daniel's memories of their marriage & heightens Rachel's insecurities about her place as Daniel's second wife - was she only second-best? Daniel's reservations about taking on Jennifer's case are complicated not just by personal feelings but the need for his company to keep Lyle Linstrum happy. He can have no idea of the complications that the case will bring to him personally as well as professionally.

I also loved all the detail about scientific research & the constant need to publish, chase grants & funding, the temptation to heighten or even falsify results is ever-present. The atmosphere of the lab, with its strict security & focused researchers, was great but I always love the sense of place that Christine Poulson evokes. The Cambridgeshire Fens, Ely Cathedral & especially the lonely stretch of water where the barge is moored, were so evocative. As a cat lover I also have to mention Orlando, the ginger cat who has several significant scenes in the narrative. Katie Flanagan is a very sympathetic character & I'm pleased that Deep Water is the first in a series featuring Katie. The moral & ethical dilemmas in the story are incredibly knotty & all the characters have to grapple with the human cost of their actions. I always read Christine's books in a great rush & this was no exception.

Lion Fiction kindly sent me a review copy of Deep Water. You can read more about Christine's work at her website here & there are interviews with Christine on Sue Hepworth's blog & at Clothes in Books.

Plans

Now here's a very enticing idea. Simon from Stuck in a Book & Karen from Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings are hosting a reading challenge later this month called The 1924 Club.
All you have to do is read a book published in 1924. There's a list of possible titles on Simon's blog. I've read quite a few of them but two that I do have on the tbr shelves are The Matriarch by G B Stern & The Three Hostages by John Buchan. I'm looking forward to exploring the shelves to see what other possibilities I have.

Which brings me to my other plan. Christine Poulson (author of Invisible, one of my Top 10 books last year) has just blogged about her plan to stop buying books for a while. I read this & thought Yes! What's good enough for Christine is good enough for me - until Christmas, anyway! I do have several pre-orders on the way - Alison Weir's biography of Lady Margaret Douglas, The Lost Tudor Princess, Claire Harman's biography of Charlotte Brontë, the British Library's collection of Christmas mysteries, Silent Nights, & Jennifer Henderson's biography of Josephine Tey, so I won't feel too deprived. It's the eBooks that are the real temptation because they're so easy to buy & they're invisible so don't even take up room on the tbr shelves. Let's see how long I last.

I've been able to think about all this because we're having a public holiday today - for a football game. It's not even on until tomorrow but we're having a day off on the eve of the AFL Grand Final anyway. So now we're the city with a holiday before a football game & a holiday for a horse race (Melbourne Cup Day in November). It's also the start of the first run of hot weather we've had since last summer. At least the sun is warming up the veggie garden so I can start planting in the next few weeks.

Now for some completely unrelated cat photos. I don't have any new photos of the girls (I almost got a shot of Lucky with my 1924 books but she was unco-operative) so here are the collages I made last year when I discovered the collage app.
The clocks go forward tomorrow night & summer is almost here. Oh well, only six months until I can change the clocks back again!

Sue Hepworth - free ebook

In honour of World Autism Awareness Week, Sue Hepworth is offering her terrific romantic comedy, But I Told You Last Year That I Loved You, for free, on Amazon for the next few days. I loved the book when I read it a few years ago & Asperger's, & the impact it can have on relationships, is a major theme of the novel.

Here's my review & here's a post that Sue wrote about her decision to self-publish the book. Sue is also working on a screenplay of the novel & you can read more about that on her blog. An interview with Sue is also featured on Christine Poulson's blog today.

Top 10 Books of 2014

Happy New Year everyone. Here's to another year full of health, happiness & lots of reading time.

This time last year, I was looking at this pile of books on my desk & vowing to read at least some of them in 2014. Well, I read five of them - that's it, only five. So, the other day, I had a clearing of the decks & shelved what was left (there were another two piles of books behind these that I was going to read "next" but of course, I didn't). I also shelved the pile of books & magazines sitting on the table beside my reading chair. This year I'm going to have only the books & magazines I'm currently reading on that table. It was a wonderful feeling to see my desk almost clear, apart from library books. It also gave me time to listen to two episodes of In Our Time (on Tennyson's In Memoriam & the Restoration of Charles II) with Melvyn & guests as it took me ages to rejig the overflowing tbr shelves to fit them in to their appropriate places. See this post here if you'd like to see how I organise the tbr shelves).

Looking at that post of reading resolutions from last year I did manage to read more from the tbr shelves, including those middlebrow authors I love. I read fewer books though than I have for years - only 95 & only 3 rereads. I think I've been rereading less because I still feel I need to post regularly & I don't usually review a book if I've already written about it. I bought 181 books last year (another useful, or scary, aspect of Library Thing is that I can see when I added books) & I've read 42 of them. This sounds quite good until I confess that some of the books I bought were duplicate copies of books I already own (for the justification for that little habit, read this post). I also added 56 books to my Kindle, quite a few of them were free downloads & that doesn't include the books I bought from elsewhere such as Delphi Classics.

So, finally, here it is, my Top 10 list for 2014. It wasn't difficult to come up with the list, I knew as soon as I read most of these books that they would be on my Top 10 for the year. The books are in no particular order & the links are to my reviews.

The Far Country - Nevil Shute. As Thomas from My Porch says, Shute is D E Stevenson for boys. I loved this story of a refugee doctor who emigrates to Australia after WWII & the new life he makes for himself here.

Kirkham's Find - Mary Gaunt. A book I'd had on the tbr shelves since 1988. Another Australian story about an independent woman overcoming the disapproval of her family to make a life for herself.

The Prime Minister & The Duke's Children - Anthony Trollope. I'm going to cheat with two of my choices because I read pairs of books that go together. I finally got around to reading the last two Palliser novels this year as I watched the wonderful BBC TV series. You can't beat Trollope for an absorbing story & I loved reading about the lives of Plantagenet Palliser, Glencora & Phineas Finn, their families & friends.

Campaigning for the Vote : Kate Parry Frye's Suffrage Diary & Kate Parry Frye : the Long Life of an Edwardian Actress and Suffragette - Elizabeth Crawford. My other cheat involves the two books I read about Kate Parry Frye. I think Kate was the person I enjoyed meeting the most this year through her diary & through the excellent biography by Elizabeth Crawford. I was so moved by Kate's long life, the challenges she overcame & her courage in her later years, caring for her husband, John.

The English Air - D E Stevenson. I read 9 books by DES this year, spurred on by discovering Open Library & by the reprints of her work that seem to be coming thick & fast. The English Air was reprinted by Greyladies a couple of months ago. This was my favourite, set during WWII it's the story of a young German who visits English relatives in the years leading up to the war & experiences a new way of life that changes all his ideas.

Invisible - Christine Poulson. I haven't read many mysteries or thrillers this year at all but I did love this one. The story of a man who has secrets in his past & the woman who loves him & is drawn into danger when he disappears. I read the last half in one sitting, I just couldn't put it down.

One of Ours - Willa Cather. Another author I read when I was young is Willa Cather. I rediscovered her this year & look forward to reading more of her books & the Selected Letters in 2015. I loved the story of Claude Wheeler, his life on the family farm in Nebraska & his search for something to give his life meaning. The Great War gives him his opportunity to make a difference.

Four Sisters - Helen Rappaport. I couldn't have a Top 10 list without a couple of history books. The story of the daughters of the last Tsar was beautifully told by Helen Rappaport with such sensitivity. I especially enjoyed reading about the Grand Duchesses work as nurses in the Great War & the discovery of previously unknown letters from Anastasia to a friend when the family were in exile. A tragic story well told.

A Lifelong Passion - ed Andrei Maylunas & Sergei Mironenko. Leading on from Four Sisters, this is the story of the last Romanovs told through their letters, diaries & memoirs. Fascinating to read the story in their own words & to read the many familiar extracts & quotes in context.

Moby-Dick or, the Whale - Herman Melville. My last book of the year was one of the best. I listened to it on audio & the wonderful performance by William Hootkins made this one of the most memorable books I've ever read.

There it is, my Top 10. I'm looking forward to reading other lists from my favourite bloggers or just leave a list in the Comments.

Christine Poulson's Invisible at a great price

Amazon US has the Kindle edition of Christine Poulson's thriller, Invisible, for just 95c US at the moment.
Click on the title link for my review. It's one of the best thrillers I've read this year, highly recommended.

Invisible - Christine Poulson

Jay & his family are settling in to a new house. But this isn't a planned move. Jay is in witness protection & his wife, Mia & son, Sam, seem unsure & a little apprehensive about their new circumstances. Next morning, a devastating explosion kills Mia & Sam & leaves Jay with physical & mental scars.

Five years later, Jay is still in hiding, but from who & what, we don't know. He is having an affair with Lisa, a single mother caring for a teenage son, Ricky, with cerebral palsy. Lisa & Ricky lived with her father, Lawrence, until his recent death & she is still grieving for him & the support he always gave her. Lisa & Jay met through a mutual interest in Chinese culture & continued to meet one weekend a month, always in out of the way cottages. The relationship suited Lisa. Ricky & his needs always came first & Jay understood that & never wanted more than she was willing to give. Lisa's ex-husband, Barry, had left when Ricky was a baby, unable to cope with his disability. He had always contributed financially but has had no contact with Lisa or Ricky for years. Suddenly, Barry turns up with a proposal that disconcerts Lisa & threatens to change her relationship with her son.

Lisa told no one about Jay, although she suspected that Lawrence had an idea that she was meeting someone on her precious weekends away. They lived in the moment so it didn't seem odd that Jay never talked about his family, his past or the scar on his face. But, after a visit to a stately home one weekend, things changed. Jay became reluctant to leave their rental cottage, no more visits to museums or eating out. Then, Lisa arrives for the weekend & Jay doesn't show up. At first, she's desperate, thinking he's had an accident or has been taken ill. She can't contact him, he doesn't phone or write, & she begins to discover how little she really knew about the man she loved. As her friend, Stella, says, "In my experience these things hardly ever come out of the blue. So often there are warning signs, just little things that you didn't want to see at the time. It's only when you look back that you realise." Stella thinks that Jay was married & that he's dumped Lisa when he was found out. The truth is so much more complicated, as Lisa discovers when she begins to look for those little moments, those hints that something was not quite right.

Jay, on the other hand, has realised that falling in love with Lisa was the biggest mistake he could have made. He's working on a plan to take revenge on the man who forced him into witness protection & killed his family. He knows he can't contact Lisa but doesn't realise that, as well as putting his own head above the parapet, he's also put her in great danger.

Invisible is a great thriller. I can't say too much more about the plot because the twists & turns are the whole point of reading a book that wrong foots the reader at every turn. I really needed to concentrate, especially in the beginning as many characters are introduced & their relevance only becomes clear as events unfold.  In the end, I just put aside an afternoon to finish it because I couldn't wait to find out what happened next. Invisible is more than a conventional thriller though, because we have the domestic, ordinary story of Lisa & Ricky alongside the story of Jay. This was the real attraction of the book for me. I'm not a fan of thrillers which are just one long chase after another with a little violence thrown in. As a fan of Spooks (I never missed an episode), I also loved the way Jay carried out his plans & Lisa's trip to the British Library - I can't say any more! Christine Poulson kept me reading by giving out just enough information to intrigue & puzzle so that I had to read just one more chapter. That's why, in the end, I just dropped everything else & read the last half of Invisible in one sitting.

I loved Christine's earlier series of crime novels featuring Cambridge academic Cassandra James & I still live in hope that there will be another Cassandra mystery one of these days. The series is available in ebook format, & the first book, Murder is Academic, is available in paper from Ostara Publishing, which has a great classic crime list. I read Invisible as a Kindle ebook & it's also available in paperback. There's more information at Christine's blog, A Reading Life.