Fiona Erskine is both a chemical engineer and a mainstream thriller writer. While the ‘engineer by day, writer by night’ dictum keeps her careers separate in real life, there is plenty of crossover in her fictional worlds.
There have not been many engineering novelists. In fact, it is a profession that generates mainstream literary figures at a rate of roughly one per century. In the twentieth there was Nevil Shute, aeronautical engineer and designer of airships. In the twenty-first there is the UK’s Fiona Erskine – “engineer by day, writer by night” – who has “turned rock into fertilizer, recovered and recycled precious metals, brought medicines to market, made amazing new polymers, exported electricity and directed international construction projects”.
Erskine would be the first to admit that she has not reached anything like the level of literary immortality attained by the author of such classics as On the Beach and A Town Like Alice. But she shares enough characteristics with the legendary...