In becoming a scientist, Claire Cyrus hopes to escape the fate of her
dead father, a brilliant but critically unsuccessful poet whose poverty
and bitterness derailed her own strong talent for verse. Soon after
moving from England to take up her first job in a start-up biotech
company in the Netherlands, she finds herself an outcast in her strange
new environment, shunned by her jealous colleagues and moving only on
the fringes of the expatriate community. But when she makes an
accidental discovery in the lab, her life will never be the same again.
The Honest Look is a tale of passion, betrayal and a devastating secret
that threatens to bring down careers, a company and a widely accepted
scientific theory. Unfolding in the modern corporate laboratory, where
the idealism of advancing knowledge and the uncompromising reality of
profit margins exist in uneasy truce, this is a story of how people with
various stakes in a common endeavour react when its integrity is called
into question, and how these reactions can be shapedand warpedby denial,
greed, hatred and love.