Description

On the morning of December 4th 1984, municipal workers in Bhopal, India, were clearing some 4,000 dead bodies and thousands of animal carcasses from the streets following the world's worst industrial accident. The toxic cloud that caused the massive death toll formed when water poured into a tank of improperly stored methyl isocyanate (MIC). It doesn't look dangerous. And you can't smell it until it's too late. You can only hope it's not sitting around anywhere near you . . . In the Scottish city of Dundee, life and all its complications are proceeding much the same as usual. The recklessly brilliant DI Donna Davenport, struggling to hide her bi-polarity from police colleagues and get over the break-up with her partner Libby, has been suspended from duty for a fiery and inappropriate outburst to the press. DI Evanton, an old-fashioned, hard-living misogynistic copper has been newly demoted for thumping a suspect, and transferred to Dundee with a final warning ringing in his ears and a reputation that precedes him. And in the peaceful, rolling farmland of Fife a deadly store of MIC, the toxin that devastated Bhopal, is being illegally stored by a criminal gang smuggling the valuable substance necessary for making cheap pesticides. An anonymous tip-off starts a desperate search for the MIC that is complicated by the uneasy partnership between Davenport and Evanton and their growing mistrust of each others actions. Compelling and authentic, Toxic is a tense and fast paced crime thriller.