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Susan Daitch: The Adjudicator

Zedi Loew is an adjudicator for Pangenica, Inc, a company that provides babies to prospective parents, with the babies, in theory, conforming to their parents’ desires. Yes we are in the future, in Brave New World territory. Much of Europe and Asia seems to have changed with new countries while the old ones have gone. The parents come to the company with their requirements and the company stitches, snips, adjusts their genes and, nine months later, the parents come and collect the result. There are no more hunchbacks, psychopaths, no physical deformities, no, or
limited mental anguish insofar as genetic engineering can exert control. a there are fewer doctors. People get sick in mild ways, get colds or have accidents, but there are no more major diseases like cancer, no autoimmune or hereditary diseases, no dormant genes for illness waiting silently to be turned on and then get to work with corrosive intent. Mistakes are very rare but it is the job of Zedi and her colleagues to deal with the rare problems. She herself is not perfect – . I struggle with the anomaly of a premotor cortex gone kablooey. She now worries that she might lose her job because there are so few problems. The few problems they do get are because parents are not entirely satisfied about how their children have turned out.

But of course there is going to be a problem or there would not be a story. One morning she finds unusually ,a file on her desk – she would normally receive it electronically. Not surprisingly something seems to have gone wrong, Two couples met when picking up their babies and the two mothers remained close. There is a long account about what went wrong, according to one of the mothers but, to sum up, it seems that her daughter, Pom Pom, turned out to be an unpleasant child – online abuse and the like – and the son of her friend, Clayton, seemingly committed suicide. Equally importantly there were issues such as one child getting ill or feeling pain and the other reciprocating. She believes there was cross-contamination of the genetic material. To make matters more complicated the complainant mother, known as Singe, apparently a corruption of the French cygne, ,meaning swan seems to have disappeared. She is long since divorced and, as we learn her daughter Pom Pom is incapacitated following a car accident. The matter gets even more complicated when the application file is not in the usual place but seems to have been removed and is only accessible to those with special security clearance which our heroine does not have and cannot get.

She has been here before so, with the help of a special unit, she once again assumes another persona and sets off as an insurance adjuster to find the missing mother.

Much of this novel could be said to be a whodunnit as Zedi endeavours to trace the disappeared Singe and part of course fascinating and serious discussion around the issue of genetics/DNA/heredity. We know that if your parents have blue eyes there is a good chance you will but, as blue eyes are recessive, if one of your parents carries the brown eye gene, that is dominant and you will likely have brown eyes. All of these physical attributes can in, this future, be presumably calculated. It is more difficult with behavioural attributes. If you have a parent that behaves badly will you and/or your siblings behave badly? That is far less clear, not least there is not a single badly behaving gene. These issues are discussed in some detail, both as relates to the possible cross-contamination and in general as relates to others including herself. Her mother was a single parent and never married and is now hooked on a super sleeping pill She had previously worked for another genetics company.

Much of the book is about is about our heroine’s attempt to track down Singe who has gone off grid and inevitably Zedi has a host of interesting adventures involving such things as meeting a key player just outside the tiger cage at a zoo during a hurricane, having a punch-up with the Pangenica security guards, watching a horror film on a remote island while unexploded ordnance explodes, meeting two separate people who have lost an arm and much more. In particular she finds out that most of the people she meets, particularly but not only Pangenica employees are not what they seem, with many having dubious pasts and/or engaged in criminal activities. Indeed, she herself is often too naive and trusting. We learn that security at Pangenica is very erratic and we learn of the back stories of the key players which are often colourful.

The book is set in some unspecified time in the future bu there is a lot that seems familiar to us. They listen to twentieth century music – the Beach Boys and the Ramones, watch twentieth century films and even enjoy John Cleese. Various items – phones, trains, junk food, illegal drugs to name but a few – seem very familiar. I could comment for pages on the issue of genetics and related subjects. Daitch has clearly done her homework and I learned a lot about the subject from synaesthesia to what is and maybe is not transmitted genetically. Are we our patents, grandparents, siblings? No clearly not but…

Overall I found this first-class novel with a very clever and complex plot and a lot of really interesting discussion on genetics and related topics.

Publishing history

First published in 2025 by Green City Books