Index of Suspicion

Index of Suspicion opens in the heart of Silicon Valley, though centered on the biotech, not the high-tech world. The characters reflect the rich cultural diversity of this sparkling, vibrant, and sometimes crazy area.
Halliday Inc. is a small company that offers expertise in a wide range of fields including forensics. They hire out their services to tech companies, government agencies, and the occasional private individual. Halliday methods are state of the art, their results reliable and confidential.
Reid Durham is Halliday agent who has just successfully wrapped up an arduous murder case, and is looking forward to time off for R&R during this wet and stormy December.
But, of course, that’s not to be.
Before he can even begin, he is sucked into a disturbance at Grant Lake, a campground in the hills above SF Bay. The problems are being caused by Lester, a wealthy and basically harmless introvert who lives in a nearby penthouse suite, and Marley, his sometime lover who is behaving very, very strangely.
When it becomes known that Marley works at the Waxman Institute, local police hackles are raised. The Waxman is an elite research facility, especially in the area of toxicology, and their freezers are full of exotic, esoteric biochemicals from around the world. Could this be the start of a new wave of bizarre street drugs?
Reid goes to the Waxman to investigate, and so begins a journey of revelations and life altering events for him and others, dear – and not so dear – to him. He and his young partner, Chyll Nguyen, team up with Kelsey Theroux, a Waxman toxicologist who was raised at a Mission in the Amazon, try to unravel wisps of clues while facing vicious dangers. As they dig deeper, they find this is no drug threat; it is a well-orchestrated, well-funded plan to transform a South American economy into a first world giant, replacing China as the world’s main source of many 21st century high value products.
Pulling the strings behind this scheme is the Consortium, a shadowy group of global power players. They have persuaded a team of Waxman scientists to use molecular biology, epidemiology, and mutated disease vectors to create a controllable bubonic plague epidemic, one that can be turned on and off at will. The Consortium intends to use the epidemic to force the evacuation of native Amazonas tribes from ore-rich jungle areas. Doing so will allow them to mine extensive deposits of Rare Earth metals – key components driving many modern high-tech markets.
In confronting this powerful steamroller, Reid, Chyll, and Kelsey become embroiled in hard challenges that demand courage, tough choices, and genuine love.
Index is set in three different locations, each about one third of the book. After the Bay Area, the action spills over to northern California in the Six Rivers National Forest region. Reid, whose grandfather is half-Yurok and half-Karuk, spent much of his youth there after losing his parents, and knows the area well. But this year the Klamath River, swollen by relentless winter rain, is a maelstrom of danger that pulls in Reid and Chyll.
The last section of the book is set in the Amazon rainforest, where Kelsey is pursuing more facets of tense mystery. When she is joined by Reid and Chyll, events culminate in an explosive climax.