The Genesis Code

Joe Lassiter awakens to the ring of the phone in the dead of night. His sister and her young son have died in a blaze in their expensive home near Washington, D.C. Rushing to the scene, Lassiter learns the deaths were no accident: his sister and nephew were brutally murdered in their beds before the fire was set. The police are stumped, but Lassiter knows one thing: whoever killed his last living relatives provoked the wrong man.
Lassiter heads a thriving high-tech investigative agency in the nation's capital. If there's a paper trail, he can follow it. A computer encryption, he can crack it. An identity to reveal, he will track it down. Now he's got to uncover why an innocent mother and her child were targeted for death. And this one is personal.
There is a mysterious suspect. Discovering his identity only raises more questions. Then Lassiter uncovers another crime - another innocent mother and child murdered. The more he unearths, the larger the web of conspiracy grows. Every thread he pulls tightens the knot of deception. And as the link that connects the victims eludes him, he suspects that others my die very soon if he can't find the truth - a search that will lead him into a dangerous international chase. And a truth that will shock him - and the reader - to his very marrow.

YA. The action in this suspenseful novel shifts from a picturesque hill town in Italy, to the streets of Rome, to a suburb of Washington, DC, and finally to its climax on a remote island in Maine. Joe Lassiter takes a leave of absence from his high-tech investigation agency to search for the murderer of his only sister and her son. He soon finds himself analyzing a string of other unsolved murders of mothers and their young sons, all of whom stayed at a fertility clinic in Italy. A physician renowned for his success at artificial insemination, a rural priest with a terrible secret revealed in confession, and the charismatic leader of a conservative Catholic organization all provide clues that lead Joe to the one person who can help him solve the mystery. This fast-paced thriller will draw YAs into some interesting questions concerning the use of DNA material and the ethics of genetic engineering, and will provide them with fascinating insights into the uses of modern investigative techniques.?Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

On the track of child killers with global reach, a dogged investigator uncovers a plot that gives new meaning to ecclesiastic militancy, in a chillingly effective debut by the pseudonymous Case. Joe Lassiter, the head of a transnational security firm, is devastated by the inexplicable murders of his sister Kathy and her young son Brandon. When the only suspect in the crime, a closemouthed Italian, escapes from a Virginia hospital's prison ward, he assigns himself to the case. Lassiter follows a winding trail that leads him around Europe to Naples (home of Umbra Domini, an ultraconservative Roman Catholic order committed to the church's old, preVatican II ways) and subsequently to a mountain village in Umbria. In this remote hamlet, he learns that a world-class geneticist named Ignazio Baresgi (since deceased) ran a clinic (now burned to the ground), which provided artificial-insemination services to a clientele that at one time included Kathy. Lassiter also learns that, before Baresi went into medicine, he was a respected theologian whose specialty was relics. Although the sinister Umbra Domini, headed by a charismatic priest named Silvio della Torre, and its legions of lay adherents on both sides of the Atlantic make several attempts to eliminate him, Lassiter persists in his inquiry. At length, he traces Dr. Baresi's only surviving patient--reclusive film star Callista Bates, who quit Hollywood cold at the height of her fame--to an island off the coast of Maine, where she lives quietly with her son, Jesse. Using Bates as a sounding board, Lassiter soon confirms his own suspicions that Baresi was using the remains of ancient holy men in ways that (thanks to a breach in confessional secrecy) sent Umbra Domini after him with a vengeance. Before the unarmed pair can act on their insights, however, they must deal with the deranged della Torre and his homicidal minions. A first-rate biotech thriller with an intriguing, if ungodly, religious twist. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A doctor's confession to an Italian priest is so disturbing that the priest refuses to absolve him, then closes his church and waits four days for an audience with a cardinal in the Vatican. A few months later, a woman and her young son are gruesomely murdered and their house set on fire. The brother and main character, Joe Lassiter, is determined to find out why. He's pleased that the man who did the killings is in custody in the hospital, badly burned. Then the impossible happens: the killer escapes. So begins a compelling and suspenseful first novel about murder and religious fanaticism. The story moves along at a tremendous pace but is so packed with intriguing tidbits about the information age that it's at once a little unsettling and hard to put down. Great reading right to the very end; for most popular collections.?Shirley Gibson Coleman, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., Mich.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.