Nobody Sequenced the Sheep

A rare organism that lives in pigs and sheep turns up in a foot ulcer, a groin swab and a throat, in three people who are not ill with it, all off one hospital's bench. An environmental health officer reads the literature correctly, and a family bakery closes on a Tuesday morning. Then a second laboratory reports it, and a third. The genomes, when they come, are too alike to be true, and the only thing the specimens have in common is something that was done to them.In a leased unit on a business park north of Cambridge, four people and three sequencers work out where infections come from. Jon Marrable has no doctorate, came up through the bench, and reads the weekly cluster list to the end because somebody has to. This time the list carries two isolates of a species almost nobody in England cultures for, and everything that follows - the incident meetings, the questionnaire, the closure, the abattoir - is done correctly, by competent people, on the information they had.A cosy procedural with real stakes and real science: the evidence is checkable, the comedy is aimed at the meetings and never at the patients, and the answer is not a cure and not a villain. It is a lot number.A Micro Binfies mystery. Each book is a complete case and can be read first.