Bad chemistry - Gary Krist

A quality thriller by an American short-story writer whose work has been compared to Updike and Cheever in the New York Times - a gripping suspense story featuring a former Chicago woman cop trying to leave her past, whose husband disappears into thin air, and a 14-year-old boy who finds a mutilated corpse in snowy woodlands.

Joel Baker, a wealthy importer with an interest in computers, leaves his home in the suburbs of Washington DC one evening to pick up some groceries. He never returns. Now his wife Kate, a social worker trying to distance herself from a former life as a Chicago cop, has to make sense of his disappearance, and of the unsettling discoveries the police keep making in their investigation. 14-year-old Evan finds a mutilated corpse in the woods but keeps it quiet. Finally he contacts Kate and tells her. The corpse is linked to Joel's business and for the first time in her life Kate finds herself on the wrong side of the law she has sworn to enforce. Together with Evan, and evading the police, she embarks on an increasingly desperate search for the man she thought she knew as her husband which takes her from suburban Maryland to the deeps woods of rural Pennsylvania; from the comfortable world of upper middle class to the renegade subculture of 'smart drugs' and internet-assisted crime. Bad Chemistry is a thriller that is as much about marriage and deception as it is about the deadly interaction of illegal drugs and computer technology.