Geneva

When Nobel Prize-winning scientist Professor Sarah Collier is invited to attend a prestigious biotech conference as guest of honour with all expenses paid, her husband Daniel is keen her to attend, but Sarah has reservations. Under the glitz of the worldwide recognition she gained from saving millions of lives through her pioneering work on the Ebola virus, Sarah lacks confidence, certain that she is already starting to show the same telltale signs of Alzheimer’s disease that beset her father: memory loss, blackouts, chunks of time lost from a life that is starting to feel like a spiral into chaos.

Despite these concerns, Sarah allows herself to be persuaded by Daniel to accept and is whisked off to the Schiller Institute in Geneva who are hoping to gain Sarah’s endorsement for an apparently groundbreaking technology that holds the potential for a cure for the disease that threatens to claim her mind and that besets countless others around the globe, stripping away their memories, their families and ultimately their lives.

But not everyone is a fan of the pharmaceutical industry. Blogger Terri Landau is an at times critical and controversial voice, pointing the finger at their exploitative practices, conflicts of interest and unfair price hikes. She’s already hovering around the Schiller Institute’s big event hoping to scoop an interview with the reclusive Sarah Collier.

Geneva is told is an series of short chapters, often alternating between first person narratives from Sarah and Daniel, told in the present tense, interspersed with blogs from the Landau Reports. The narrative never settles long in any one place and whilst this maintains the pace, it felt somewhat disjointed at times, especially when the story abruptly cut to sections in the third person past tense focusing on Institute boss Mauritz Schiller and his flashy, confident head of public relations, Helen Alder. One character I particularly liked was Pavel Orsinov, Schiller’s head of security, who pulled off the inscrutable bodyguard act with commendable ease and turned into an extremely interesting dark horse in a tangled tale where at times it was difficult to tell friend from foe.

Actor Richard Armitage follows in the footsteps of countless other celebrities who have turned their hands – with varying degrees of success – to writing. Geneva is a pacey medical thriller with an added dash of domestic noir set in the icy surroundings of Switzerland’s snowclad mountains. The already brittle relationship between Sarah and Daniel seems set to freeze and shatter as the tensions mount around the launch of the Institute’s potentially controversial technological solution to a huge medical problem.

I liked Sarah Collier as a character. Her confusion and escalating mental deterioration is well and sympathetically portrayed, and will strike a chord with anyone who has had to watch a family member or friend fall prey to this cruel and lonely disease. I was a lot less taken with Daniel, a man who seems deeply jealous of his wife’s success while always having an eye to his own personal gain as he hangs onto her coattails. The medical details were convincing without dumping an avalanche of information from on high, and the plot gathered pace nicely to a satisfying conclusion that left no inconvenient loose ends.

I’m shallow enough to hope that Armitage doesn’t give up his day job, but Geneva was an intelligent, highly competent thriller that bodes very well for the future of his alternative career path. I enjoyed the dangerous black run of the closing chapters, where the plot unraveled at breathtaking speed, confirming some of my suspicions but confounding others. Once I checked in the baggage of my natural cynicism for the celebrity-turned-author bandwagon, I was able to settle down and enjoy the ride.