The Devil's DNA

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing literary mystery
Review: She has written a guidebook, a thriller, a diatribe on genetic engineering, a tale of sexual passion, a literary history of Scotland, a genealogy of selected European royals, and called it "The Devil's DNA".
This magical monster of a novel is full of the author's passions and in its intense feeling for place echoes that of the early Lawrence. East Lothian and the great Bass rock brood over the whole.
The story-line is strong and ingenious. It concerns the thwarting of an evil plot to steal human foetal eggs for purposes of customising blonde, blue-eyed babies for the Mexican market. This heinous scheme is uncovered and defeated with extreme jeopardy by a computer fraud journalist and an Edinburgh hospital doctor.
The plot has improbabilities and coincidences to rival Shakespeare's - but is perhaps really only a vehicle for the author's own obsessions. Characters have, for example, total recall of the poetry or prose of Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson, or they have a scholarly knowledge of the interconnections of the royal houses of England, Scotland and Spain, with specialist knowledge of the haemophiliac inheritance from Queen Victoria.
Another author might have buried the obsessions, making them subordinate to character or plot. Not this one. But in some extraordinary way it does work for much of the book, as does its almost operatic propensity to suspend action for a lengthy digression. As a consequence, the reader finally emerges slightly bemused, vastly instructed - and wondering if this just could be an extremely original book.
I would be interested in other people's reactions.