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What could the Shroud of Turin, a conservative Southern senator and an entrepreneurial researcher have in common? Here politics, religion and bioscience collide in the latest novel from the master of the medical thriller

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Senator Ashley Butler is a quintessential demagogue whose support of traditional American values includes a knee-jerk reaction against virtually all biotechnologies. When he's called on to chair a subcommittee introducing legislation to ban new cloning technology, the senator views it as a keystone to his political future. As a consequence, Dr Daniel Lowell - inventor of a technique that will take stem-cell research up to the next level - sees a barrier being raised before his biotech start-up

These seemingly opposite personalities may clash during the Senate hearings, yet the two men share a common failing. Butler's hunger for political power far outstrips his genuine concern for the unborn; while Lowell's pursuit of massive personal wealth and celebrity overrides any real considerations for his patients' well-being

Further complicating their confrontation is the confidential news that Senator Butler has developed Parkinson's disease - which leads the senator and the researcher into a Faustian pact. But in attempting to utilize Lowell's new technology prematurely, the therapy leaves the senator with the horrifying effects of temporal lobe epilepsy - causing seizures of the bizarrest order

Taken straight out of tomorrow's headlines, Seizure is a cautionary tale for this age when new biotechnological discoveries are pulling us ever further into a promising yet frightening new world