The Doomsday Genie centers around the emergence in America of what appears to be a deliberately manufactured Weapon of Mass Destruction of incredible ferocity.  It triggers the counter-reaction of all the Federal forces that would normally respond to such a threat.  Heroes - and heroines - emerge in what is a race against the odds.  But at the core of the novel is the possibility that somebody - possibly terrorists, possibly others - have created the first truly artificial life form.

Recently - and the research is ongoing - colleagues have been attempting to do just that - attempting to produce the first lab-created artificial life form.  Mostly they work with bacterial forms and genes, so that what emerges is a derived, and thus not really new, life form.  My contention is that to create a truly original life form you would have to start with something that more closely resembled a large DNA type of virus...

And now, suddenly, the real dangers of any such experiment become altogether obvious.  In the past, when scientists have experimented with viral forms, what emerged was rather like the plot of my book.

I confess that I enjoyed creating the "entitity" in Doomsday Genie.  It was great to return to the thriller format of earlier and very successful novels, such as Tiger Tiger and Goodbye Baby Blue.  I also enjoyed the liaison with that grat artist friend of mine, Mark Salwowski.  So the entity you see on the cover of the book is very close indeed to what I had in mind.  And I did fall back on scientific knowledge to create it. 

But, hey, don't worry!  It's only fiction...