The Cure by Eve Smith – blog tour

My first encounter with Eve Smith was with her second novel, Off Target, in which genetic engineering of children is normal. I very much enjoyed it – spec fiction being my favourite type of genre fiction these days. Two years later and her fourth novel The Cure is here, and this time she’s tackling the other end of life in ageing.

The novel has two narrators, who largely alternate. we begin with Mara, an investigator for Omnicide, at a crime scene where a clandestine lab has been manufacturing rejuvenating vaccines. Soon we’re introduced to Ruth, who at 115 is trying to live out her last years peacefully.

However, we soon move to an earlier timeline for Ruth, beginning eighty years before. We discover that she was a scientist researching a cure for Progeria (a real and rare life-limiting genetic condition where children prematurely age). Her daughter died of it aged twelve and she has devoted her life to finding a cure ever since.

Just as Ruth is making inroads into a cure, she accidentally stumbles on something else – which her lab boss is soon desperate to monetise and thus with the money from Erik Grundleger’s company, ReJuve is born. It’s an annual vaccine which reverses your biological clock.

But Erik wants immortality, of course, and he manages to develop the vaccine further, creating SuperJuve – only available to the super-rich of course. However, it soon becomes apparent that the SuperJuve has side-effects – with those using it developing paranoias and psychosis – including world and business leaders with awful effects. That’s why Mara’s job is hunting down SupeJuves who’ve outlived their allotted 120 years, the time at which everyone has to submit to ‘Transcendence’.

Theoretically, Grundleger and many of his scientist colleages died in the bombing of his company HQ in Jamaica a while ago. But something Mara discovers from the SuperJuve she caught at the lab is that that may not be the case. She is on Erik’s trail, and will join forces with Ruth’s peerless scientific knowledge.

I can’t say more. The Cure is a real page-turner! There are twists and turns all along the way – some you’ll see, others you won’t. There is a real division between the haves and the have-nots in this novel, not everyone gets the basic ReJuve jab. Some are forced to live a normal lifespan – this in a world that’s now got too many people and is hotter than ever. Most food in the cities is lab-grown. It’s not until Ruth travels with Mara to Jamaica that she tastes fresh home-grown food for the first time in ages.

Smith is very strong on Ruth’s grief and guilt over her lost daughter, but particularly her guilt at having invented the ReJuve in the first place when it was a side-effect of her progeria research. Mara is more inscrutable – but as the novel goes on, we begin to find out more about the young officer – which tantalises more. The stakes get higher and higher as they uncover more of Grundleger’s ‘legacy’.

The question is, of course, who wants to live forever? As Smith says in her afterword on the inspiration for the novel, ‘And should medical funding be focused on age reversal when many curable non-age-related-diseases are still prevalent, particularly in lower-income nations?’ The cost will inevitably drive a wedge in there, won’t it? Smith has done her research well, there is plenty of cutting-edge science from now in the mix, along with her extending current thinking into the near future, and she doesn’t lecture her audience with it, it flows quite naturally inside the story.

Medical thrillers are great: spec fiction medical thrillers are even more fun! I very much enjoyed The Cure, and will love to see what she tackles next.

Source: Review copy – thank you. Orenda paperback original, 309 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link (free UK P&P)