In becoming a scientist, Claire Cyrus hopes to escape the fate of her dead father, a brilliant but critically unsuccessful poet whose poverty and bitterness derailed her own strong talent for verse. Soon after moving from England to take up her first job in a start-up biotech company in the Netherlands, she finds herself an outcast in her strange new environment, shunned by her jealous colleagues and moving only on the fringes of the expatriate community. But when she makes an accidental discovery in the lab, her life will never be the same again. The Honest Look is a tale of passion, betrayal and a devastating secret that threatens to bring down careers, a company and a widely accepted scientific theory. Unfolding in the modern corporate laboratory, where the idealism of advancing knowledge and the uncompromising reality of profit margins exist in uneasy truce, this is a story of how people with various stakes in a common endeavour react when its integrity is called into question, and how these reactions can be shaped—and warped—by denial, greed, hatred and love.
