Review: The Cure, by Eve Smith

LIVING FOREVER CAN BE LETHAL…

Ruth is a law-abiding elder, working out her national service, but she has secrets. Her tireless research into the disease that killed her young daughter had an unexpected outcome: the discovery of a vaccine against
old age. Just one jab a year reverses your biological clock, guaranteeing
a long, healthy life.

But Ruth’s cure was hijacked by her colleague, Erik Grundleger, who hungers for immortality, and the SuperJuve – a premium upgrade – was created, driving human lifespan to a new high. The wealthy elite who take it are dubbed Supers, and the population begins to skyrocket.

Then, a perilous side-effect of the SuperJuve emerges, with catastrophic
consequences, and as the planet is threatened, the population rebels, and laws are passed to restore order: life ends at 120. Supers are tracked
down by Omnicide investigators like Mara … and executed…

Mara has her own reasons for hunting Supers, and she forms an unlikely
alliance with Ruth to find Grundleger. But Grundleger has been working on
something even more radical and is one step ahead, with a deadly
surprise in store for them both…

My Review

Thanks to Anne Cater for organising this blog tour and to the team at Orenda for sending a copy of this book.

In a not so distant future, the NHS is providing a yearly longevity vaccine, and everyone gets to live to 120. The population exploded as deaths decreased. Around the world cities have become megacities, sprawling across continents. And a few people, the wealthy, have become immortal.

Ruth is an elder of 115, living in a collective in Oxford, doing her National Service providing the vaccine at a clinic. She takes what good she can from life, spending time with friends and remembering her daughter and partner. Mara is an investigator with Omnicide, the group tasked with hunting down, arresting, interrogating and killing Supers. In her late twenties, she’s solitary and angry. She avoids her mother and tries to make time for her best friend, Jen.

Mara is called in to investigate a murder at a clandestine lab and discovers someone who is supposed to be dead. This sends her off down a rabbit hole, as she realises that Erik Grundleger is probably still alive. She desperately wants to find and kill him, the man responsible, ultimately, for her father’s death. Ruth sees the arrest of the mystery man on television and immediately recognises him as a former colleague. Who should be dead, along with everyone else at the lab in Jamaica run by Grundleger. Then she gets a letter from an old friend who was also supposed to be dead.

Ruth gets a message to Mara, and the pair head off on an investigation that takes them, eventually, to Jamaica and the Atlantic ocean, where they discover so much more than they thought possible.

The story moves between the present investigation and the past, for both Mara, as a child, and Ruth, as an adult researching a treatment for a condition that ages children and kills them as young teens. We follow the development of the treatment she discovers and the way it is stolen by commercial interests in the form of Erik Grundleger. There are also adverts for clinics and ‘transcendence services’, and news articles, which add to the story.

The novel is thoroughly researched and takes the efforts of those in the anti-aging and biohacking community to the logical extreme, genetic manipulation that reduces the effects of aging and ultimately provides immortality. The name of Grundleger’s wealthy backer seems to be inspired by two of the ultra wealthy individuals found, at least in past years, in Silicon Valley (his name is Jeff Busk – take a guess). There’s a strange little community of fascists in the U.S. that encourages wealthy white people to have lots of children, and they overlap with the strange little community of fascists that ‘biohack’ and search for ways to live longer, so they can enjoy their wealth. Because love of money is the root of the urge to longevity and many children in these communities, and it is at the root of events in this novel.

Eve Smith writes speculative thrillers about things that scare her, and I have to say, the world she builds in this novel is truly terrifying, because it is so easy to imagine it happening. A medical breakthrough that is twisted into a commercial product, unregulated use, and the fall out effects of that spiral out into people’s lives. And destroy the world.

The characters of Mara and Ruth are complex and they bounce off each other, they turn out to be the person the other one needs to help them heal from their past traumas. It’s a well plotted, complex novel, with rounded characters. Even Grundleger, who initially comes across as a money hungry researcher, divulges various family traumas that he believes motivates and justifies his actions. He’s wrong, obviously, but he still has understandable motivations.

I found this novel engrossing. I was in a lot of pain while reading this novel and still couldn’t put it down!

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Eve Smith writes speculative thrillers, mainly about the things that scare her. Longlisted for the Not the Booker Prize and described by Waterstones as ‘an exciting new voice in crime fiction’, Eve’s debut novel, The Waiting Rooms, set in the aftermath of an antibiotic resistance crisis, was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize First Novel Award and was a Book of the Month in the Guardian, who compared her writing to Michael Crichton’s. It was followed by Off-Target, about a world where genetic engineering of children is routine, and ONE, about survival in a world ravaged by climate change. Eve’s previous job at an environmental charity took her to research
projects across Asia, Africa and the Americas, and she has an ongoing passion for wild creatures, wild science and far-flung places. She lives in Oxfordshire with her family.

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