Annabel, the main character, is a woman of honor in the scientific field. Gross gives Annabel great field skills, courage, energy and dedication. I thoroughly enjoyed enduring the Australian forests, feeling the mistaken hand on a snake, smelling the bat guano...
Gross gives credibility to women in science, yet does not make them single-minded creatures of study. Annabel deals with the death of a family member that haunts her studies, attractions to others, and even some romance, yet she maintains herself as a reliable and steadfast scientist, too.
Brava!
Interspersed with the Australian segments are glimpses of Leon's life in Boston and that of Annabel's sister's in Connecticut, flashbacks of memory, as well as E-mails and imaginary letters that travel between the two sisters, that contribute to our understanding of the characters' inner lives. These devices bring balance and the exotic Australian outback enlivens the plot to what might otherwise be a ho-hum story.
In the course of all this mind slush, is the curve ball. John Goode, the typical absent minded type professor goes missing. This is nothing unusual for him, he is quirky, often takes off for over-lingering research jaunts and is also suffering remorse as a result of an affair recently committed which has decimated his family.
The elder son, Leon travels back home to Australia from America to search for his father. In the course of the investigation, he meets Annabel, a name he was given that could shed some light on his father's disappearance. The inevitable attraction occurs while the search for answers continues. The formula for a ripping novel was there, but it just didn't get off the guano.