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FINAL COPY
by Jan Brogan
Larcom Press, July 2001
317 pages
$25.00
ISBN: 0967819946


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Addy McNeil is a reporter for Boston's News-Tribune. She has been exiled from investigative reporting to real estate, because she developed an addiction to tranquilizers after the untimely death of her much beloved older brother, Rory, who was in his mid 30s and physically fit, but who succumbed to cardiac arrhythmia. Addy is convinced that his death did not result from natural causes. She is ultimately proven correct.

Addy manages to wangle an assignment that she believes will be her passport back to investigative reporting, a profile of Kit Korbanics, CEO of The BioFund, a venture capital company with many investments, some more profitable than others, and now in a shaky financial position. Addy was romantically involved with Kit fourteen years ago, when he was brother Rory's college roommate. Kit is suspected of pushing his partner, Francis Marquesson, off the balcony of a hotel where a biomedical convention was being held. Kit maintains that Marquesson, a former MIT professor, committed suicide but acknowledges that the two had a raging argument minutes before Marquesson's death. Marquesson's widow is convinced that he would not have committed suicide, since a French pharmaceutical company was about to buy BioFund, making Marquesson a wealthy man. Addy is equally convinced that Kit did not commit murder and makes it her mission to find evidence to exonerate him.

At the same time, she is peripherally involved in the search for the manufacturer of a synthetic cocaine, a substance that has caused a string of deaths in the Boston area and one that finally proves significant in Addy's investigations.

Addy has the ethics of a snake. She commits one of journalism's major sins, by not only becoming involved with her subject but sleeping with him -- and then making all sorts of rationalizations for not recusing herself from the article. At the end of the book, she does something so unspeakably disgusting and dishonorable that I resolved never to read another word about her.

Brogan is masterful in her description of the newsroom, with its internal politics and feuds. She seems equally adept at discussing science (I say "seems," because my own knowledge of science could fit handily on the head of a pin), as well as the money and risk involved in biotech startups. All in all, an engrossing tale, but with a heroine who turns out to be anything but heroic.

Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Devine, November 2002

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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