SYNBIO

Stolen DNA, shadowy links to North Korea—a scientist is lured into a dangerous game of weaponized disease in this “gripping, twisting” thriller (Janet Gilsdorf, author of Ten Days).

Seth Stringer is a biohacker. Young, brash, and ambitious, he works in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hacking into DNA the same way hackers infiltrate computer systems: manipulating organisms by inserting new DNA or exploiting genetic mutations that can trigger fatal heart attacks or induce bipolar illness or Alzheimer’s. 

Biohackers like Seth can perform their experiments in their kitchens using equipment purchased for next to nothing on eBay. Seth is obsessed with exploring the frontiers of genetic manipulation—but he can be a little naïve. When his former professor Marcus Adair dangles a job in London working for an international pharmaceutical company called Chimera, Seth jumps at the chance. He can make good money and cement his relationship with his girlfriend, who has misgivings about his future prospects as a breadwinner. 

What Seth fails to realize, until it’s too late, is that the principal business of Chimera isn’t the manufacture of generic drugs, but the production of lethal genetic products for well-heeled clients. These are used to assassinate or debilitate presidents, prime ministers, and CEOs using their own DNA against them, a method that not only makes it difficult to identify the perpetrator—a cold virus can deliver the engineered DNA—but makes it almost impossible to determine a crime has been committed in the first place . . .