Call this partial "shameless self-promotion" since in promoting my new book, I will be promoting my co-author as well as my own interest. But I hope the book will interest some of you and others you know.

Last month Springer International, the Swiss Science publisher, brought out our novel, The Hunt for FOXP5: A Genomic Mystery Novel. Although Springer is a science publisher, they also have a select list of science fiction founded in good science. The good science comes from my co-author Dr. David Deamer who is one of the world's leading astrobiologists and biomolecular engineers. We were undergraduate roommates at Duke University. If the suspense, characters, and plot are interesting, you can give me most of the credit there.

The book has a web page: www.FOXP5.com

A review from the web site of Popular Science begins this way:

I've read a good few novels that attempt to provide edutainment - to work as a good story while simultaneously providing the reader with the kind of interesting information about science you might find in a popular science book. Most don't work at all. Either they fall over on the fiction writing, painfully lathering on the facts and writing amateurish prose, or they are so science-light that they are, in effect just straightforward hard science fiction, perhaps with a 'science behind the story' at the back. This title by Wallace Kaufman and David Deamer, I would say, is the best I've ever read in terms of achieving a balance of the two.

In the Hunt for FOXP5 we meet genetics professor Michelle Murphy and her extremely intelligent daughter Avalon (yes, really), adopted from a Kazakhstan orphanage, the way you do. In a mix of archeology, genetics and nationalist political intrigue we get a feel for how the FOXP2 gene may have resulted in human language ability distinguishing early humans from the other humanoids - and how a later single mutation, producing the (fictional) FOXP5, could result in extraordinary human intelligence. This change is something that the scientific leader of Kazakhstan wants to make a national treasure, so we end up with plenty of fun involving capture, escape and rescue attempts to give the plot action.