A Secret About a Secret

Spiegelman (Dr. Knox) makes a rare misstep with this venture into quasi dystopian territory. Agent Myles, a member of the Standard Division, an intelligence service of an unnamed country with hints of Scandinavia and northern England, is dispatched to a secretive biotech company campus to investigate the murder of Allegra Stans, who had worked on a confidential project with government connections. Myles quickly learns of Stans’s vigorous sexual appetites over her seven-year tenure, both with colleagues and outside Ondstrand Biologic’s claustrophobic confines. The campus’s history as a boarding school with a sordid past reinforces the locked-room aspects of Myles’s investigation, which bogs down in repeated descriptions of Stans as sexually aggressive and emotionally detached. When Myles confronts the company founders with an account of Stans’s foray into corporate espionage, the school’s horrific legacy becomes an immediate, deadly threat to the investigator. Only the murky, ambiguously explained omnipotence of his own agency can save Myles as he strives to solve a crime within a crime. This falls short of this otherwise accomplished author’s best. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary. (June)