After a scandal ends her career, geneticist Margaret McEllis discovers letters that reveal her cold, distant father’s long-buried tenderness—and lead her across the country under a false name to find the woman he almost left everything for.
The Alchemy of Wonder (85,000 words) sits at the intersection of women’s fiction and thriller—Lessons in Chemistry meets Succession.
Margaret’s metabolic research at Johns Hopkins was going to change medicine. Then an affair with her mentor gave the university the excuse it needed to erase her.
What she doesn’t know: her father, CEO of a pharmaceutical giant, orchestrated her downfall when her science threatened his company’s blockbuster drugs.
Reeling from disgrace, Margaret finds letters hidden in her father’s study—evidence that her cold, distant father once loved a woman named Carrie with the kind of passion Margaret remembers from childhood, before he traded it for status.
Margaret follows the trail. Carrie is Dr. CJ Jennings, founder of a metabolics biotech in La Jolla. Margaret tracks her to a conference in Baltimore, impresses her with sharp questions about insulin resistance, and walks away with an invitation to apply for an internship. She convinces a family friend to sign a marriage license so she can use his name, applies as “Margaret Walsh,” and tells herself she’s just looking for answers.
What she finds is more dangerous: a mentor who sees her clearly, a team doing science the way it should be done, and evidence that the same machinery that killed her career is now targeting them. And this time, the work being targeted isn’t academic—it’s a cure.
To warn them, she’ll have to reveal who she really is—David McEllis’s daughter, carrying all the complicity that name implies.
And she’ll have to face the truth that the father who sabotaged her future once had the capacity for wonder, and chose ambition instead.
Elizabeth Berrett 