SOJALS rating:

Good (3/5)

I first read this on the 8th April 2003.

At the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Louise Benoit and Paul Kiriyama are enjoying a quiet night shift. They are excited when the detector starts reporting near-continuous events. They are amazed when they discover not neutrinos in their heavy water detector, but a living person struggling against drowning.

The hapless victim is Ponter Boddit a scientist in the field of quantum computation. It impossible to explain how he has appeared in their neutrino detector two kilometers underground. It's also impossible to explain how come he is a living, breathing, talking Neanderthal.

And of course, Ponter is no longer where he came from, and back there his partner has been accused of being responsible for Ponter's disappearance, has been accused of murder most foul.

I anticipated a boring read because foolishly I thought "neanderthal man among us" to be a hackneyed plot and expected no new twists upon that basic theme. Well, that's me, appallingly dumb. Dumb beyond belief sometimes.

This was a great book. Sawyer tells a great story with a delicate and intelligent touch. He twists our assumptions about many areas, in sex, in religion and in particular how we are what we eat.

I am eagerly awaiting the chance to read "Humans" and "Hybrids", the other two books in trilogy.