THE GENE SOLUTION

A fertility doctor invents a gene-editing technique that draws the attention of wealthy people and protesters alike in this medical thriller.

Over the course of this story, debut author Rochelle unusually alters the narrative voice of his omniscient narrator to reflect the personalities of his shifting characters. He opens with literary prose when describing the funeral of Tripp Galloway’s deceased younger brother, Henry, a victim of cystic fibrosis who “always dreamt of becoming a pilot in between hospital visits and trying to breathe.” He switches to a sarcastic tone to portray Tripp, now an OB/GYN specialist who gains Food and Drug Administration approval for a new gene-editing procedure to “wipe that shit stain of a disease”—sickle cell—“off the face of the planet.” Word of Tripp’s success reaches Slavomir Krukov, a wealthy, violent Russian whose wife, Anna, carries the gene for hemophilia; it also reaches Jodi-Ann Kapp, a Mississippi homemaker who believes that a vaccine caused her son’s autism. The pacing falters then, because Krukov and Kapp—who provide the novel’s major conflict, as both are after Tripp for different reasons—disappear for a while in favor of company meetings and a minor plot regarding a couple who both carry the cystic fibrosis gene but want to have a child. However, the pace picks up again, with some memorable scenes, as when Kapp accosts a couple exiting Tripp’s clinic, “a fake baby, covered in fake blood, was lobbed from the middle of the protesters and hit the man square in the face,” making him look like “a modern day warrior, now decorated for battle,” and when Krukov murders Dennis, an FDA employee on a crusade to shut down Tripp’s company, Krukov calls cleaning his weapon on Dennis’ shirt a “cliché.” These scenes add off-color levity to a novel that tackles gene editing, and its science, in an offbeat way.

A timely thriller buoyed by accessible science.