Stephenie Meyer, author of the immensely successful young adult books has gone adult with her new thriller, The Chemist. Meyer’s Twilight novels were turned into hit films, but she was criticized for creating the character Bella Swan, as a rather too passive teen, constantly mooning over the Edward, the Vampire, while Jacob, the hunky Werewolf stood by waiting for her attention..

The protagonist, Juliana aka Alex, of The Chemist, is completely different. She is small built, but fiercely independent, totally capable of looking after herself as well as the guy she is compelled to protect.

Alex is a doctor and a specialist in chemicals—such a wiz that she is recruited right out of campus by a secret branch of the US government. The chemicals she and her mentor Dr Barnaby concoct are used to torture terrorists. Then, her shadowy employers decide that the two know too much and try to kill them. Alex escapes by the sheer fluke of being in the bathroom when the attack takes place, but Dr Barnaby gets a painful death.

She runs and spends the next few years staying under the radar and deflecting further assassination attempts by being smarter than the hired killers, and creating an almost foolproof security system, that entails sleeping in bathtubs in a succession of nondescript motels, wearing a gas mask to protect herself from the toxic chemicals meant for the attackers. Her belt has syringes of poisons, even the jewellery she wears contains deadly chemicals. The woman who says of herself, “I am the bogeyman in a very dark and scary world… frighten people who aren’t afraid of anything else, not even death. I can take everything they pride themselves on away from them; I can make them betray everything they hold sacred. I am the monster they see in their nightmares,” is certainly not a sitting duck.

When she is tired of hiding and living like a gypsy, she contacted by the agency to take up one last job, because many lives are at stake. In spite of her caution, she finds that the man – Daniel—she I assigned to interrogate is innocent. Not just that, he is handsome and kind, and has fallen in love with her at first sight. He continues to be enamoured of her even she has had a face bashed up in a fight, and goes through most of the novel with a battered visage. She is baffled by his feelings for her and even more by the melting of her tough heart.

“I am intrinsically incompatible with being an object of romantic interest,” she says to him at one point.

“I understand you,” replies Daniel, “I just don’t agree.”

Due to a set of very complicated circumstances—and Meyer is adept at creating many such—Alex has to go on the run again, this time with Daniel and his over aggressive twin, Kevin, dodging a bunch of very bad people, who want to kill them all.

The book is fast-paced and has a lot of action sequences, which seem to have been written as set pieces for the movie that will invariably get made. Her last non-Twilight book, a sci-fi novel called The Host was a bestseller, but not even close to her vampire and werewolf series. The Chemist is also a bestseller and with a protagonist like Alex, has the potential to be turned into a franchise, even though Meyer says she won’t write a sequel. What she has proved with this enjoyable book is that she is not bound to any particular genre. The best takeaway from The Chemist is making cracks in the myth that women can’t be scientists.

The Chemist
By Stepenie Meyer
Publisher: Little Brown
Pages: 518