John McCabe: Paper

Black Swan

$24.95

Review: Jocelyn Berry*

If you thought that science was certain, "Well, that is just an error on your part," said the American physicist Richard Feynman.

And if you thought forensic science was certain, that's an even bigger error on your part.

John McCabe explores this theme in his new novel, a quirky thriller with the emphasis (rather too strongly) on the quirky.

Anti-hero Darren White is a scientist at the Sheffield Institute of Medical Diagnostics, where he makes his own contribution to the fallibility of science on a regular basis.

Darren is up to his eyeballs in boredom, guilt and defeat. He spends his days pipetting tap water from one Eppendorf tube to another, surrounded by the sociopaths and monomaniacs he works with.

His obsession with developing the last unifying theory of the 20th century prompts Darren to seek outside assistance, in the form of controlled substances. Unemployment ensues. Surely life can't get any worse.

Then he discovers a mysterious database of DNA profiles on a secondhand (read stolen) computer. It appears to be a collection of suspects, but what was the crime?

And why are more than half the profiles those of doctors, two of whom may or may not be former colleagues of his?

The main plot is a clever twist on the standard whodunnit formula, one in which not only the perpetrator but also the crime and the victim must be deduced.

The elegant solution to this puzzle provides Darren with the closure he has so often yearned for but so seldom found in science.

The story, told from several perspectives which merge neatly at the climax, is filled with (mostly) entertaining digressions.

Nonetheless, it would be greatly improved by the author taking a scalpel to at least one of the more distracting sub-plots.

* Jocelyn Berry is an Auckland scientist.