That he has. Bad Chemistry revolves around Kate Theodorus, a former beat cop turned social worker. After a discomforting opening--a party at which a dog is mysteriously set aflame--Kate's husband Joel heads out to a convenience store for some microwave popcorn. Hours pass, then days, and still he fails to return. Has Joel been kidnapped? Has something gone seriously wrong with his importing business (which does, after all, sell "natural" pharmaceuticals from the Amazon basin)? With the aid of the most unappealing 14-year-old computer hacker in existence, Kate takes the case into her own hands, swiftly stumbling across cybercrime, robbery, and a selection of corpses. As the mystery of Joel's disappearance unravels, Krist keeps the pages turning very nicely. What's more, he makes the missing-person motif work metaphorically, as a figure for all of our inherently ambiguous relationships: "What a mystery marriage is," Kate thinks, "any marriage, every marriage. You try to make it good, but you never really know if you're succeeding." Fusing psychological insight with a cops-and-robbers plot isn't easy, but for the most part, Krist has pulled off this bit of literary chemistry with admirable expertise.

Product Description
Bad Chemistry poses an unsettling question: How much do we really know about the people we love--or about ourselves?

Kate Theodorus used to be a cop in Chicago.Eager to escape the ugliness and violence of police work, she moved to Washington, D.C., to create a new life for herself as a social worker.There she married Joel Baker, a successful entrepreneur whose edgy nonconformism--so different form the conservatism of her overprotective family of Greek cops--seemed to mesh perfectly with her new conception of herself.Three years later, on a snowy November night, Joel leaves the house to pick up some groceries.He never returns.Kate embarks on a search for her husband--and for the truth about the parts of his life that he has hidden from her.When the police unearth evidence connecting Joel to illegal drug trafficking and a murdered biochemist, Kate finds herself thrust back into the familiar world of clues, surveillance, and guns that she thought she had left behind.But this time, she's operating outside the law she was sworn to enforce.

In Bad Chemistry, literary prizewinner Gary Krist has created a taut story of suspense, a charged tale of a woman's struggle to resolve conflicts within her marriage and within herself.As the story races to its intense conclusion, Kate must face the disturbing fact that her journey has taken her to places no one would ever want to go.

This book begins with a creepy misfit, fourteen year old Evan Potter (in the throes of adolescent uncertainty about his identity) keeping his discovery of a headless corpse in the woods near his home a secret. It then immediately shifts to a introduction of Kate and Joel Baker, who are throwing a dog birthday party for their German Sheperd Hermann. When tragedy mysteriously strikes during the party and Joel then fails to return from a supposedly quick trip to the grocery store, we soon surmise that these two seemingly separate events may be related. As Kate stuggles to deal with her husband's disappearance, she is aggravated by the initial skepticism of the police thay foul play was involved. Thus, by the time the corpse is reported to the police and identified as an associate of her husband, and evidence of illegal drug activity is unearthed, she has alienated the authorities to the extent that she is considered a suspect. Meanwhile, we gradually learn Kate and her husband were quite an odd couple who married only three years ago after a whirlwind courtship shortly after her move to DC to begin a new career. He was a counterculture student turned businessman who ran an importing firm, and as his mother told Kate "had no repect for fences", physical or legal. Kate's background could not have been more different - Kate Theodorus, formerly a Chicago cop from a family of cops and with brothers still on the force.

Kate soon discovers that her husband apparently led a double life, and the truth and nature of their whole relationship is called into question. And as the danger mounts and intrigue deepens, in a wonderful description she finds herself becoming "proto-Kate, a discontinued model. But now... she wondered how much things had really changed. Here she was again, loading up, giving herself the power to do harm." As she wonders if she will now have to kill, something she never did while a cop, we get some powerful insights into human emotions and relationships.

Kate and Evan eventually use their skills to unravel the mystery and track Joel and his former college friend and gradually discover their location and the secrets of their relationship. And Kate has to confront the ambivalence between her feelings as a former cop about illicit drugs and her husband's belief in the right of each individual to control the substances which they choose to put in their own bodies. The twists and turns are rapid, and the psychological profiles of Kate and Evan very well drawn.

I really wrestled with my rating, and almost made it five stars. I was captivated by the book, and stayed up late to finish reading it. And I really liked Kate and hope she reappears in another book. However, the following flaws bothered me. First, some of the actions by Kate, Evan, the police, and the other characters were a little too unbelievable (even when made in the immediacy of the moment under duress). Also, on a few occasions Kate's discovery of certain items of evidence seemed a little too convenient (especially the videotape). I accepted these aspects and kept reading, but they just didn't ring true. Second, Joel's character perhaps would have benefitted by being fleshed out a little; except very briefly at the start and finish, we only glimpsed him thru Kate's eyes. Third, I found the ending vaguely unsatisfying - a little unbelievable and somewhat of an anticlimax. But if you like thrillers that are more than the usual action and delve into the lives and thoughts of some weird and interesting characters, I recommend this book as an excellent read.


Look, Honey, The Dog Is On Fire   May 15, 2002
 1 out of 2 found this review helpful

Gazing out into their backyard Kate and Leon note that the neighbor's dog is engulfed in flames. Immediately ruling out spontaneous combustion as the cause of this unusual event, the couple decides that the dog burning is a forewarning of something ominous. Later that same day Leon goes to the store for some microwave popcorn, and never returns. Much later a burglar breaks into the house in the middle of the night. Kate now feels that something is really wrong, and the police, after finding drugs during their search of the house, totally agree.

I thought that this might really be an interesting tale, what with the burning dog and all. Sadly the story never really comes alive. Turns out that lighting a dog on fire is simply a message meaning "See me at once, I have bad news." Clever way to communicate; really beats the risk of using the telephone.

Well, anyway, Kate and her sidekick 14 year old Evan (yes, 14 is correct) take off after the bad guys. Is her husband alive or isn't he? Is he mixed up in some sort of designer drug lab? Are two recent deaths connected to her husband's disappearance? Will another canine be torched? These are the questions that Bad Chemistry sets out to answer. Will the 14 year old kid do something really stupid? You don't need to read the book, of course, to answer that last question.

It's not a bad book. It's just an average one, a modestly entertaining easily forgettable tale. So forgettable that I raced to type this review before the story evaporated from memory.


A Different Kind of Drug Thriller   April 8, 2002
 2 out of 2 found this review helpful

This is a very cool take on biotechnology and the new pharmacology. Most thrillers about drugs are about the usual recreational kind, but this one is about designer drugs that can change the way you are--that let you, in a sense, choose WHO you want to be. That plays into the character theme of the novel. We can "design" our consciousnesses, but does that mean we can know each other any better than we did before? Krist doesn't think so. The writing is also great here--very smart, interesting. And the two main characters are really fascinating, especially the fourteen-year-old kid, who may be one of the weirdest dudes in contemporary literature.


boring, generic   March 25, 2002
 1 out of 4 found this review helpful

This book is extremely boring and uninteresting. It is not different, it is the same kind of thing that has been written a million times.


Like reading an outline for a novel   March 12, 2002
 0 out of 3 found this review helpful

Okay, follow these steps:
First 80 pages:
1) a murder or a disappearnce forces a regular person to start investigating
2) he/she finds some names

Pages 80-180
The person travels to visit these names and interview them

Pages 180-250
The person relaizes one of these names has deceived them, and returns for a Second Visit
only to find they have left for someplace Exotic.

Pages 250-320
Perosnl follows them, big violent set peice at the Exotic Location (in this case, a mountain town)

This book is formulaic, horribly written--the 'show me don't tell me' rule of writing has apparnatly passed Krist by. Sentences like "Kate was sad." "Kate didn't know who to believe." It's like reading an outline for a real novel.