Paper

Research geneticist, club DJ and novelist John McCabe serves up more science, crime and a wry take on the modern world in his second novel. His debut, Stickleback, featured the antics of a couple of techno-drones toiling in the new coal mines that are computer data bases. Paper is again set amid the hi-tech drudgery of a modern lab as Dr Darren White "a 30- year-old, highly qualified, but generally incompetent" geneticist becomes obsessed with finding the last great unifying theory of the 20th century. White, almost inevitably, loses both his job and his grasp of reality, but the discovery of some highly unorthodox DNA profiles on a second-hand computer gives him purpose and transforms him into a cyber-sleuth. As White tries to uncover the crime, the victim and the culprit, so his world becomes increasingly unhinged. The introduction of Neuro girl shows him that living in an illogical world can be fun restores some sense of equilibrium but the chase is on and becomes all the more complicated when White belatedly realises that "when it comes down to it, science is nothing more or less than people"