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COLD DARK MATTER
by Alex Brett
Dundurn Press, February 2005
326 pages
$10.99
ISBN: 1550024949


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

After Alex Brett's stunning debut in DEAD WATER CREEK, I waited impatiently to read the second in her smart series starring Morgan O'Brien, a tough and driven investigator of scientific fraud. I'm happy to report that Brett hasn't just matched the quality of her first book; she's taken her writing to a whole new level in COLD DARK MATTER.

Morgan O'Brien, a senior investigator of scientific fraud for the Canadian government, is dispatched to the Big Island of Hawaii to recover the journals of an astronomer who has recently died under mysterious circumstances at a Mauna Kea observatory.

Not long after Morgan arrives in Hawaii, she discovers that there is far more to Yves Grenier's death than the random suicide of a dejected scientist. It quickly becomes clear that someone very high up on the food chain wants his scientific diaries and will stop at nothing, even murder, to get them.

The action takes Morgan from the tourist areas of Kailua to the cold and windy mountaintop of Mauna Kea and back to the snowy Ottawa winter as she tries to unravel the intricate relationships of some of Canada's foremost astronomers. As she does so, she discovers that another researcher, one who had collaborated on important astrophysics research in the early 1960s, has completely disappeared, all records of his having lived have been erased, including from the scientific record.

As she digs deeper with the help of her friend Sylvia, the brilliant scientist-librarian, she finds that his disappearance may have had something to do with a plan by the Canadian government to identify a group of people they judged to be a threat to national security -­ homosexuals. A great deal of money was spent on the development of a machine to test for queer traits and it didn't work. Observatory personnel were pressed into the role of lab rats to test the machine. Could these experiments have played a part in the astrophysicist's mysterious disappearance?

The Cold War of the 1950s and 60s, the brutality of that period's discrimination against homosexuals, and the uses and misuses of science are themes at the heart of this novel.

As you astronomy buffs already know, dark matter makes up a huge percentage of the universe but we can't see it; we can only see how it affects the things around it. DARK MATTER is the perfect metaphor for this story because it is about the powerful, unseen forces that play a crucial role in our world and yet remain cloaked in anonymity.

Incredibly enough, all three of the intertwined stories in this book are true, only the characters and modern day circumstances have been fictionalized. Brett has done an amazing job of braiding the tales together into one action-packed mystery. As I read, the pages flew by as the many layers of the story were revealed. Even better, the story has stayed with me for a long time, the way only the best stories do.

Brett's clear and timely message in COLD DARK MATTER is that a culture of paranoia may seem justified by external threats to a country, but in the end only serves to damage its own citizens' civil rights.

This book has everything a reader could want: fabulous, exotic settings; a protagonist you'd like to spend time with; unusual characters; a bit of romance; exploration of important issues; and a plot that kept this reader up until dawn as I tried in vain to anticipate the next twist.

Buy COLD DARK MATTER. Encourage your local bookseller to stock it. Because it's Canadian, it won't get the readership it deserves, but don't let that cause you miss out on your chance to read this original, satisfying and important book.

Reviewed by Carroll Johnson, February 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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