2013
Coroner Jenny Cooper investigates …
An unlikely suicide or a deadly conspiracy?
When Bristol Coroner Jenny Cooper investigates
the fatal plunge of a man from a motorway bridge,
she little suspects that it has any connection with the
sudden death of a friend’s thirteen-year-old daughter
from a deadly strain of meningitis. But as Jenny
pieces together the dead man’s last days, she’s drawn
into a mystery whose dark ripples stretch across
continents and back through decades.
In an investigation that will take her into
the sinister realms of unbridled human ambition
and corrupt scientific endeavour, Jenny is soon forced
to risk the love and lives of those closest to her, as a
deadly race to uncover the truth begins …
The opening chapters follow here …
ONE
Scottsdale, Arizona, 12 March 1982
The last thing Roy Emmett Hudson was expecting on the eve of his forty-first birthday was a bullet in the head, but life and death are only a single breath apart, and as a biologist, he appreciated that more than most. Even as he strolled across the company lot to the Mercedes Coupé he had driven all winter without once raising the roof, his killers’ thoughts were already moving on to where they might dump the body so that it might never be found. They were from out of town, and unfamiliar with the wilderness into which the city merged only a few miles away from the Airpark business zone.
Unaware of what awaited him, Hudson counted himself a lucky man. There was no other word to describe the turn of events that had placed him in the ideal position at the perfect time. Aside from the gifted few who had secured comfortable professorships in Ivy League schools, most of his peers from the Brown class of ’ 66 were grinding out their best years in the labs and offices of the giant pharmas back east. They had become company men and women who had left their scientific ideals behind to climb the greasy pole and save for a retirement they might never reach in sufficient health to enjoy. He, on the other hand, had taken a chance. Or had chance taken him? He couldn’t decide. Either way, it had all come down to an ad in the appointments section that had lain discarded on the seat of a commuter train which he rode no more than three times each year. If he hadn’t chosen that particular Tuesday morning to put his car into the shop, or if he had arrived on the platform thirty seconds sooner in time to catch the earlier train, his working days would still have been spent on the fifteenth floor of the Meditech Building, wondering what had happened to the young man who was going to save the lives of millions and collect a Nobel Prize.
The ad had simply read: Biotech start-up is seeking gifted and motivated scientists with experience in recombinant gene technology. Full details on application. Résumé to Box 657.
The few colleagues to whom he had shown it dismissed the ad as having been placed by some gimcrack outfit trying to hitch up to the latest bandwagon. Either that, or it was a sneaky ploy by one the big corporates to test the loyalty of its precious R&D teams. Hudson hadn’t been so sure. He had had an instinct, a stirring in his gut that he hadn’t felt since he’d first stepped off the Greyhound and hauled his grip through the front gates of Brown. And he’d been right to trust it. The three directors of Genix, all young and visionary men, had wanted to attract only those curious and adventuresome enough to leave comfortable careers behind for an exciting and uncertain future. They could guarantee only twelve months’ modest salary, but offered generous share options to be taken up after three years’ service. If by that time the company had filed no patents nor had any realistic prospect of doing so, their backers would pull the plug. Simple.
It had taken Hudson’s team of fifteen less than a year to splice human DNA into E. coli bacteria and start producing human growth hormone at a level which showed potential
Coroner Jenny Cooper investigates …
An unlikely suicide or a deadly conspiracy?
When Bristol Coroner Jenny Cooper investigates
the fatal plunge of a man from a motorway bridge,
she little suspects that it has any connection with the
sudden death of a friend’s thirteen-year-old daughter
from a deadly strain of meningitis. But as Jenny
pieces together the dead man’s last days, she’s drawn
into a mystery whose dark ripples stretch across
continents and back through decades.
In an investigation that will take her into
the sinister realms of unbridled human ambition
and corrupt scientific endeavour, Jenny is soon forced
to risk the love and lives of those closest to her, as a
deadly race to uncover the truth begins …
The opening chapters follow here …
ONE
Scottsdale, Arizona, 12 March 1982
The last thing Roy Emmett Hudson was expecting on the eve of his forty-first birthday was a bullet in the head, but life and death are only a single breath apart, and as a biologist, he appreciated that more than most. Even as he strolled across the company lot to the Mercedes Coupé he had driven all winter without once raising the roof, his killers’ thoughts were already moving on to where they might dump the body so that it might never be found. They were from out of town, and unfamiliar with the wilderness into which the city merged only a few miles away from the Airpark business zone.
Unaware of what awaited him, Hudson counted himself a lucky man. There was no other word to describe the turn of events that had placed him in the ideal position at the perfect time. Aside from the gifted few who had secured comfortable professorships in Ivy League schools, most of his peers from the Brown class of ’ 66 were grinding out their best years in the labs and offices of the giant pharmas back east. They had become company men and women who had left their scientific ideals behind to climb the greasy pole and save for a retirement they might never reach in sufficient health to enjoy. He, on the other hand, had taken a chance. Or had chance taken him? He couldn’t decide. Either way, it had all come down to an ad in the appointments section that had lain discarded on the seat of a commuter train which he rode no more than three times each year. If he hadn’t chosen that particular Tuesday morning to put his car into the shop, or if he had arrived on the platform thirty seconds sooner in time to catch the earlier train, his working days would still have been spent on the fifteenth floor of the Meditech Building, wondering what had happened to the young man who was going to save the lives of millions and collect a Nobel Prize.
The ad had simply read: Biotech start-up is seeking gifted and motivated scientists with experience in recombinant gene technology. Full details on application. Résumé to Box 657.
The few colleagues to whom he had shown it dismissed the ad as having been placed by some gimcrack outfit trying to hitch up to the latest bandwagon. Either that, or it was a sneaky ploy by one the big corporates to test the loyalty of its precious R&D teams. Hudson hadn’t been so sure. He had had an instinct, a stirring in his gut that he hadn’t felt since he’d first stepped off the Greyhound and hauled his grip through the front gates of Brown. And he’d been right to trust it. The three directors of Genix, all young and visionary men, had wanted to attract only those curious and adventuresome enough to leave comfortable careers behind for an exciting and uncertain future. They could guarantee only twelve months’ modest salary, but offered generous share options to be taken up after three years’ service. If by that time the company had filed no patents nor had any realistic prospect of doing so, their backers would pull the plug. Simple.
It had taken Hudson’s team of fifteen less than a year to splice human DNA into E. coli bacteria and start producing human growth hormone at a level which showed potential
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