The snake in Sydney - Michael Larsen

Divorced 30-something Annika Niebuhr has been fascinated by snakes since her Danish childhood, and as a doctor in Sydney she has made snake bites her speciality. When a woman is brought to her having been bitten by a taipan - the world's most dangerous snake, not native to Sydney - Annika realises it is attempted murder. Inadvertently, she thinks, she is drawn into the investigation but when a close friend, a psychologist in the Australian intelligence service, 'commits suicide' and then she encounters a taipan herself, she suspects a conspiracy to conceal an impending catastrophe. A thriller that embraces fascinating facts and myths about snakes, and pits the certainties of science against faith, emotion and the paranormal, and whose climax involves a seemingly far-fetched astrological incident - which actually happened after the book's original publication.