The best books where science gets twisted into stories that thrill the reader’s soul

Relic was the story that compelled and inspired me to write my mysteries and thrillers because I wanted to write like this—books with intricate intelligent plots, smart memorable characters, and suspense that pulls nerves to the breaking point. I loved that real science twisted to science fiction drives the story.

The premise is simple. The DNA humans consume in food doesn’t change our genomes—we just digest it. But what if the DNA of something we ate integrated into our chromosomes and changed our genotype?

What if it turned humans into monsters who kill to survive? And what if that genetically altered monster lurked deep in the bowels of the New York Museum of Natural History stalking those who would stop it? Delicious!

A great book’s superpower is a story that sticks with the reader for a long time, as the Nameless collection did with me.

Dean Koontz is a master of creating deep anguish in his characters that propel their actions. Mix this emotion with science involving the brain and selective memory and you get the main character, Nameless, who doesn’t know who he is or remember his history.

Why? He willingly participates in targeted assassinations to eradicate evil from this world. Why? The quest for answers keeps the pages turning, allowing tantalizing glimpses of Nameless’s past life. When the answers are finally bared by a devastating revelation in the final story, we understand why Nameless chose his fate—because sometimes wish we could do the same.

The earth is in an another extinction period, and humans blame ourselves.

So we have the motive (guilt) to de-extinct what were once living organisms, like the passenger pigeon, Tasmanian tigers, and dodo bird. It turns out we also have the means: selective breeding, cellular cloning, CRISPR/Fanzor for specific genetic modifications.

All we needed was opportunity, and we have that now, too, in well-funded labs that can justify spending huge amounts of money on cloning a mammoth. But wiser men than I have raised an important question. What are the risks? This is why Britt Wray’s Rise of the Necrofauna is a must read for anyone planning a future vacation to a de-extinct zoo—like me.

I have been a Dean Koontz fan since I picked up Watchers.

It was truly the first book I’d read that integrated science so seamlessly into the story. It also made me wish for a genetically altered Golden Retriever that could communicate with wooden ABC blocks. And the emotions Koontz evoked in the reader for the engineered monster were deep—fear and anger layered with pity and sadness.

This book taught me that sometimes villains do horrible things for good reasons. And sometimes those reasons are completely understandable and relatable.

Remember how irritating the mathematician character was in the Jurassic Park movie?

He’s way worse in this book. And that little girl who gets stuck in the park with Alan Grant? In the book, you want her to get eaten by a dinosaur. But neither of those annoyances diminish the power and prescience of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, because we have seen and experienced these types of “gain of function” projects, some with unexpected results.

One of the most famous quotes in the book is “Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.” Words to live by.