After a scandal ends her career, geneticist Margaret McEllis discovers letters that rewrite her family’s history—and lead her across the country under a false name to find the woman her father almost left everything for.
The Alchemy of Wonder (85,000 words) is upmarket women’s fiction—Lessons in Chemistry meets Succession.
Margaret’s metabolic research was going to change medicine. Then an affair with her mentor gave the university the excuse it needed to shut her down.
What she doesn’t know: her own father’s pharmaceutical company orchestrated her destruction because her science threatened their profits.
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 buried it.
Margaret digs. Carrie is Dr. CJ Jennings, CEO of a biotech startup in La Jolla. Margaret tracks her to a conference in Baltimore, impresses her with sharp questions about metabolic science, and walks away with an invitation to apply for an internship at CJ’s company. 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 shadowy network that killed her career is now targeting them. 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 