ISBN 0-7475-0262-5 (UK pbk 1988),,, 0-451-45588-6 (UK pbk 1997)

"Something's rotten in the State of Massachusetts. The lobsters -- and the lobstermen -- are throwing off PCB readings high enough to curl anyone's hair. The Red Sox are stumbling through another season of shame. Mysterious speedboats are shadowing environmentalists' Zodiac inflatables. And fans of Poysen Boysen, a rock band with a fondness for pit bulls, have taken over a beached wreck in Boston Harbour from which lethal contamination flows freely. What the place needs is a guy with a cheap cigar, a fast Zodiac, and a bad attitude -- and a solid grounding in biochemistry wouldn't hurt, either.

"Only Sangamon Taylor, a test tube-toting vigilante for GEE -- the Group of Environmental Extremists -- can put two and two together to make all kinds of trouble. Taylor's a New Age Sam Spade in a wetsuit instead of a trenchcoat. He knows about chemical sludge the way he knows about evil -- all too intimately. And the toxic trail he follows leads to high and foul places. Before long his house is bombed, he's in the FBI's top ten -- with a bullet -- and plays a starring role in the near-assassination of a presidential candidate.

"As he navigates this ecological thriller with hardboiled wit and the biggest outboard motor he can lay his hands on, Taylor reveals himself as one of the last of the white-hatted good guys in a very dirty world." [jacket blurb, UK pbk, 1988]

"The strangest, most hostile landscape of all is here and now...

"Two hundred years after the Boston Tea Party, Boston Harbour is home to a more secretly discarded commodity -- toxic waste. Trouble-shooter, environmentalist and all-round pain in the neck Sangamon Taylor has his work cut out exposing contaminators and embarrassing powerful corporations; but with the help of his Zodiac raft he does a good job.

"In his latest operation he's chased by the FBI, possibly by the Mafia and definitely by a group of Satanists -- and that's just for openers. To follow, there's a demented genetic engineer with a newly created bacterium that's very, very hungry.

"Frightening, funny and furious, Zodiac is tomorrow's fiction from today's headlines." [jacket blurb, UK pbk, 1997]

"Captures the nuance and the rhythm of the new world so perfectly that one almost thinks that it is already here." -- (in the Washington Post )

"You'll learn more about pollution from reading this novel than you probably care to know. Ecology, adventure, and humor. Cheeky stuff." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 1994)

Recommended.