141-5

Quite different from le Carré's Smiley books! ( )

Cerca del lago Turkana, en el norte de Kenia, Tessa Quayle, una mujer joven y bella, es asesinada. Su supuesto amante africano y compañero de viaje, un médico al servicio de una ONG, ha desaparecido del escenario del crimen.
El marido de Tessa, Justin, aficionado a la jardinería y diplomático destinado en la embajada británica de Nairobi, emprende su particular odisea para descubrir a los asesinos y sus motivos. Sus indagaciones lo llevan al Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores de Londres, a varios países de Europa, a Canadá y de nuevo a África, a lo más profundo del sur de Sudán y, por último, al lugar en que Tessa murió. En el camino encontrará terror, violencia, situaciones cómicas, conspiraciones e información. Pero su mayor descubrimiento será la mujer a la que apenas tuvo tiempo de amar.

Justin Quayle, a British diplomat in Nairobi, Kenya, is told that his activist wife, Tessa, was killed while travelling with a doctor friend in a desolate region of Africa. Investigating on his own, Quayle discovers that her murder, reportedly committed by her friend, may have had more sinister roots.

Justin learns that Tessa had uncovered a corporate scandal involving medical experimentation in Africa. KVH (Karel Vita Hudson), a large pharmaceutical company working under the cover of AIDS tests and treatments, is testing a tuberculosis drug that has severe side effects. Rather than help the trial subjects and begin again with a new drug, KVH covered up the side effects and improved the drug only in anticipation of a massive multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis outbreak.

Justin travels the world, often under assumed identities, to reconstruct the circumstances leading to Tessa's murder. As he begins to piece together Tessa's final report on the fraudulent drug tests, he learns that the roots of the conspiracy stretch further than he could have imagined; to a German pharmawatch NGO, an African aid station, and, most disturbingly to him, corrupt civil servants in the British Foreign Office.

Justin Quayle is a member of the British Foreign Legation in Kenya. He has a beautiful, younger wife Tessa who is involved with various NGO aid projects – which she keeps mostly hidden from her husband as he probably wouldn’t approve.

In the opening scene she is brutally murdered.

Justin leaves his beloved gardening and his bureaucratic job to search out her projects and solve her murder.

He finds many more bodies, questionable ethical decisions and huge amounts of money leading back to big Pharma – and a drug purported to be a cure-all for the multiple drug resistant TB strains found in AIDS patients in Africa.

But too much is on the line for those in power to let their schemes be discovered.

I enjoyed this. It was very engaging and twisty and turn-y. It also brought up the ethics of big pharmaceutical countries donating their expired drugs to poor countries as well as the morality of doing testing on populations that are not fully informed and have no other alternatives for treatment. ( )