The Touchdown Gene

by Thomas Hoover

A new thriller from the best-selling author--Thomas Hoover Genetic manipulation can be a wonderful thing; but what happens if you do it to an NFL football team? Nolan Pharmaceutical was a company in trouble. So were the New York Wolverines, an NFL franchise that had fallen on hard times. Together, perhaps they could solve both of their problems; but it was to be a marriage made in hell. Sequestered on the Caribbean Island of Bonaire, the Wolverines held their normal pre-season training camp, with one exception. Nolan Pharmaceutical was experimenting with DNA manipulation to enhance the player's performance in a way that could not be detected by any drug test. Everything was going well until the lead scientist did the unthinkable. He started splicing in genes from predatory animals. Dr. Charlize Russell is called in to find out what's going wrong on Bonaire. After an accidental meeting with an old love, Alex Archer, the two of them find a seemingly endless line of people trying to kill them, which only gets worse after they discover what the scientists were doing. The plot starts fast and accelerates from there, until you are swept from a tranquil Caribbean island, to a pre-season NFL football game you will never forget.

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 26, 2011

About the author

Thomas Hoover has a doctorate in oceanography and served as senior vice president of an architect-engineering firm in New York, where he has lived for several decades. His vices include being an avid sailor and a recognized collector of the classical music of India. He began his writing career with two classic non-fiction books on Far Eastern art and religion and then moved into fiction writing with two critically acclaimed novels about English sailors in the early Seventeenth century.