A wealthy importer, Joel Baker, leaves his home in suburban Washington to pick up some groceries, and never returns. A mutilated corpse is found in the woods. Joel? Surely not. His wife, Kate, formerly a Chicago cop and now a social worker, sets out to find her wandering spouse and to lay the accusations of the local police that he is, in fact, an international drug dealer and murderer. Helped by a troubled teenage computer hacker, Evan Potter, Kate has to venture once more into a world she has imagined she has left behind. But her former training stands to her and, fighting fire with fire, she finally unravels the tangled trail left by her devious husband. Bad Chemistry is a big novel that reveals a new trend in Internet-assisted crime. Look out for more of the same in the future.