auntieannie

A writer in Cambridge writing to her lover offstage about his mother's explorations into Isaac Newton's career and discoveries. Eventually you discover that Cameron is dead. It's a complicated story that involves Lydia, the writer and her lover Cameron. Cameron is Elizabeth's son. Elizabeth has died under mysterious circumstances. Cameron has asked Lydia to complete Elizabeth's manuscript, which was a biography of Isaac Newton. Lydia moves into Elizabeth's home/studio to do this, and in the process, restarts her affair with Cameron. Cameron is a neuroscientist who is under increasing scrutiny and criticism from the animal activist groups, who have become militant in Cambridge at this time. Hanging around Elizabeth's studio is the strange Will (short for Willow), a woman who had cleaned Elizabeth's home and whom Lydia befriends (and maybe becomes lovers with?). Elizabeth was exploring Newton's career as an alchemist, and his dependence on a network of scholars, all interrelated. There's also something fishy about Newton's gaining his scholarship and chair/tenure at Cambridge, and Elizabeth began linking a series of deaths to Newton -- realizing that they were in fact murders. As this comes to light, a series of paranormal happenings occur, and Elizabeth gets involved with a medium, Dilys. Eventually Lydia retraces these steps and starts experiencing weird phenomenon around the studio as well. Cameron's behavior becomes harder to explain, and Lydia is not sure what to make of Will.Eventually we see the parallels between Cameron's activities, his alchemist like quest for scientific discovery that can be used for harm, his secret societies and Newton's. Through hearing Lydia describe the trial to Cameron in writing after the fact, we discover that Cameron was part of a syndicate who were actually staging anti-animal terrorist acts themselves to disguise what they were doing. It is through a "pact" with Mr. F, the seventeenth century schemer who murdered for Newton, that Lydia is able to stop the present day murders. However, she violates one aspect of the pact, and as a result, Cameron is murdered. Suspenseful, a pretty quick read, intriguing enough to figure out the twists but not overly complicated or convoluted.