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Book Review By Ken Jasper
Voices of Babylon by Ken Jasper

   Easy-going private detective Cameron Gilly specializes in divorce cases, but when a friend begs him to find her missing husband, prominent chemistry professor Jerry Fagan, Gilly reluctantly accepts the job. Tracking Fagan to New York, Gilly confronts and then promptly loses him, after Fagan slips him a potent new street drug, KC. Later, following a phone tap thread, Gilly goes to interview Fagan's old college professor. The old man warns him about one of Fagan's old cohorts, a biochemistry genius named Edward Roundhouse, who during the Cold War had worked to develop psychoactive drugs for the CIA, but then supposedly died in a tragic fall.
   Soon after he returns home, Gilly's teenage daughter regresses to mental infancy after licking stamps from a sweepstakes mailer, and Gilly's missing person case becomes a vendetta. As he tracks Fagan across the country, he gradually uncovers a secret consortium to produce miracle cure drugs for the pharmaceutical industry. The brain behind it belongs to Edward Roundhouse, for 25 years a fugitive from a CIA hit list. But the man at the top, Carson Breaux, has something less altruistic in mind. He's made his six cohorts unwitting accomplices in a racist plot to expunge black skin from the face of the earth by distributing an incredibly potent, genetically-keyed sterilization toxin throughout the world food chain. Gilly's personal vendetta gives way to a larger cause, as he struggles to bring down Breaux and avert a worldwide genetic calamity.


Plot & Themes
Tone of story - suspenseful (sophisticated fear)
Time/era of story:
Medical Thriller Yes
Medical Plotlets:
Kid or adult book? - Adult or Young Adult Book
descript. of violence and chases - 10 %
Planning/preparing, gather info, debate puzzles/motives - 40 %
Feelings, relationships, character bio/development - 40 %
How society works & physical descript. (people, objects, places) - 10 %

Main Character
Gender - Male
Profession/status:
Age: - 40's-50's
Ethnicity/Race

Main Adversary
Identity: - Male
Age: - 40's-50's
Profession/status:
Eccentric: Yes
The antagonists are: - racists/KKK
How sensitive is this character?
Sense of humor - Mostly serious with occasional humor
Intelligence - Average intelligence

Setting
United States Yes
Forest? Yes
City? Yes

Writing Style
Accounts of torture and death? - moderately detailed references to deaths
Explicit sex in book? Yes
What kind of sex: - descript. of breasts - rape (yeech!)
A lot of techno jargon? Yes
Kind of jargon? - biology/medical
Unusual forms of death - fright
Unusual form of death? Yes
Amount of dialog - roughly even amounts of descript and dialog
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