Terry Morgan's third novel exposing the risks of mixing high tech biological research and international politics.
Professor Doctor Yi Song was the big boss; the dà lǎobǎn, at the Institute of Molecular Biology in Shanghai.
Big boss Song never showed his private side. He was a hard and secretive task master, often not seen for weeks at a time but his instructions had to be obeyed.
Song was not only the boss of the Institute of Molecular Biology but a high-ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party (the CCP). He was also chairman of Stihl Laboratories (China), a subsidiary of the multinational pharmaceutical company, Stihl Laboratories Inc. with subsidiaries in Germany, Switzerland and India and associate companies scattered across the globe. More recently, Song had also become a director of Chinese food manufacturers.
Doctor Joshua (Josh) Warner, a British molecular geneticist at the Institute of Molecular Biology knew all this. Secretly, he'd been gathering enough evidence to go public about potential biological weapons that involved high tech genetic engineering techniques, vaccines and food additives.
But he couldn't go public from Shanghai so the plan was to return to the UK and expose China's sinister ambitions and Stihl Laboratories' research. But there was still one place he wanted to investigate - Song's own computer.
It was high risk and the repercussions too awful to imagine but together with everything else he'd gathered, the contents of Song's computer would, he thought, provide the final pieces that would convince politicians in the West to sit up, take note and do something. But fear of the power of big corporations was the problem.
From the minute he arrives in UK, Josh is hunted by sinister representatives of the CCP and Big Pharma. The few he trusts with the information are quickly abducted and killed by unknown assassins.
Written by a biologist renown for 'feasible science-based fiction' Hunted is written as compassionate notes to Josh's mother who had, unknown to him, died whilst he was in China. The story follows him during cold, mid-winter weeks in England until he visits the church where his mother was buried. Then......
Terry Morgan has been writing stories and poetry for over twenty five years, mostly while he "lived out of a suitcase", travelling with his own exporting business. With over seventy countries under his belt (some of them so many times he lost count) he now lives with his Thai wife, Yung, in Petchabun, Thailand with occasional visits back to friends and family in the Forest of Dean and the Cotswold valleys around Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK.
He writes novels with a strong international, business and political flavour, commentary on biology and environmental matters and, when he finds time, less serious humour and political satire.
Check out his website www.tjmbooks.com.
