Bad Chemistry [Hardcover]

Gary Krist (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 23, 1997

Bad Chemistry poses an unsettling question: How much do we really know about the people we love--or about ourselves?

Kate Theodorus used to be a cop in Chicago.  Eager to escape the ugliness and violence of police work, she moved to Washington, D.C., to create a new life for herself as a social worker.  There she married Joel Baker, a successful entrepreneur whose edgy nonconformism--so different form the conservatism of her overprotective family of Greek cops--seemed to mesh perfectly with her new conception of herself.  Three years later, on a snowy November night, Joel leaves the house to pick up some groceries.  He never returns.  Kate embarks on a search for her husband--and for the truth about the parts of his life that he has hidden from her.  When the police unearth evidence connecting Joel to illegal drug trafficking and a murdered biochemist, Kate finds herself thrust back into the familiar world of clues, surveillance, and guns that she thought she had left behind.  But this time, she's operating outside the law she was sworn to enforce.

In Bad Chemistry, literary prizewinner Gary Krist has created a taut story of suspense, a charged tale of a woman's struggle to resolve conflicts within her marriage and within herself.  As the story races to its intense conclusion, Kate must face the disturbing fact that her journey has taken her to places no one would ever want to go.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

During the 1980s, Gary Krist won a solid reputation as a decidedly literary author. In collections such as Bone by Bone and The Garden State, his characters wrestle with a variety of down-to-earth dilemmas--family discord, bum relationships, career confusions--and their success or failure at resolving these problems makes for elegant and intelligent narratives. This time around, however, Krist applies his psychological deftness to a more pulse-pounding genre, attempting to produce that chimerical creature, the thinking person's thriller. Has he succeeded?

That he has. Bad Chemistry revolves around Kate Theodorus, a former beat cop turned social worker. After a discomforting opening--a party at which a dog is mysteriously set aflame--Kate's husband Joel heads out to a convenience store for some microwave popcorn. Hours pass, then days, and still he fails to return. Has Joel been kidnapped? Has something gone seriously wrong with his importing business (which does, after all, sell "natural" pharmaceuticals from the Amazon basin)? With the aid of the most unappealing 14-year-old computer hacker in existence, Kate takes the case into her own hands, swiftly stumbling across cybercrime, robbery, and a selection of corpses. As the mystery of Joel's disappearance unravels, Krist keeps the pages turning very nicely. What's more, he makes the missing-person motif work metaphorically, as a figure for all of our inherently ambiguous relationships: "What a mystery marriage is," Kate thinks, "any marriage, every marriage. You try to make it good, but you never really know if you're succeeding." Fusing psychological insight with a cops-and-robbers plot isn't easy, but for the most part, Krist has pulled off this bit of literary chemistry with admirable expertise.

From Library Journal

It sounds like a thriller?a husband disappears, and the wife trying to track him down discovers that he may be an international drug dealer and a killer. But the folks at Random, who love this book, call it a real genre bender. From the author of The Garden State, winner in 1988 of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 351 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (December 23, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679449310
• ISBN-13: 978-0679449317
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,318,874 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Before turning to narrative nonfiction with The White Cascade and his current project, City of Scoundrels (coming in April 2012), Gary Krist wrote three novels--Bad Chemistry, Chaos Theory, and Extravagance--and two short-story collections--The Garden State and Bone by Bone. He has been a regular book reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, Salon, and The Washington Post Book World. His satirical op-eds have appeared in The New York Times and Newsday, and his stories, articles, and travel pieces have been featured in National Geographic Traveler, The Wall Street Journal, GQ, Playboy, The New Republic, Esquire, and on National Public Radio's "Selected Shorts." His stories have also been anthologized in such collections as Men Seeking Women, Writers' Harvest 2, and Best American Mystery Stories. He has been the recipient of The Stephen Crane Award, The Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lowell Thomas Gold Medal for Travel Journalism, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife and daughter.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Different & interesting., February 1, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Bad Chemistry (Paperback)

Krist's style was clean and straightforward, and the plot, hinging on smart drugs, was interesting to me. I found this via mystery, but Berkley calls it general fiction and I think that's more accurate. At first, there was a paradigm shift in how I read this since it wasn't closer to the mystery genre (sometimes I like more formulaic easy reads) but this was worth it.

Three elements that struck me. First, this book felt as if it were starting mid-series, and not in a bad way. I was interested in Kate's past as a cop, and by the end of the book I was hoping for a chance to read about her again. Second, the supporting character of Evan, a misfit teenage boy, was an odd and uneasy choice -- but the character development was subtle and fascinating. Third, the whole smart drugs driven plot was intrinsically interesting; the point of view on it, through Kate, was conventional, but the author's view may have been slightly more balanced. There was a whole backstory from the husband's point of view that we didn't see; I would not have minded reading this interwoven with Kate's even though the mystery surrounding him was the vehicle for the plot.

I picked up on some similarities to Particia Cornwell, but it may just have been the setting and a few chance resonances. I can't really think of any one author this reminds me of (which is good); Carol O'Connell, maybe, but with the more focused humanity of a Thomas Cook.

I went out and looked for more of Krist's work but it's hard to find and apparently this is his first supsense-type outing. I hope to read many more.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Chemistry, April 26, 2000

By 

Peter Weymouth (Putney, Vermont) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bad Chemistry (Paperback)

This is a tremendously entertaining novel.. Gary Krist has an excellent ear for dialogue and his heroine is likeable and appealingly flawed. It's a taut, gripping book that makes you think while you're plowing through the plot at breakneck speed, with more than enough twists and surprises to satisfy even the most jaded thriller reader. Best of all, it manages to go beyond the sex and violence that too often define the genre.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gary Krist's Bad Chemistry, March 16, 2000

By 

Shea Wallus (Kalamazoo, Michigan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bad Chemistry (Paperback)

Gary Krist's 'Bad Chemistry' has an outstanding message within the literature of this book. The message is that no matter how well someone knows someone else, that they will undoubtedly be surprised. Joel Baker definitely suprised his wife Kate Baker within this book. He surprised his wife by disappearing, and leaving all of his secrets behind. Kate realizes that the Joel Baker that she knows is not the real Joel Baker; that he had a secret drug involvement, and many other secrets. Kate is determined to find the man that she married, and will do anything to accomplish this.When a friend of Joels, Jin Liang-Lu, another man involved in the drug ring, is murdered with his hands and head cut off, the surprises are full blown. All in all, Joels return is not for his wife, but for information that he left on his computer at their house. While this entire scenario is going on, Kate us becoming closer friends with the boy who found Jin's body, Evan Potter. Everyone who reads this book can identify with at least one character or one point of view, and get the same message. That even those who are close, can be very surprising.