Ruthless and rich, Tiago has tired of the greed of corporate life. The thrusting Adonis of the trading floor, he has ambitious plans that just might secure a halo to complement his angelic looks.

But poor Tiago is in love, and can't start his quest for sainthood until he has convinced urbane art dealer Raphael Davide they would make the perfect power couple. Raphael's a slave to beauty with his own designs on the undeserving rich, and a suave exterior that belies a gentle - and recently broken - heart. But though Raphael's in safe hands - his sister Clara and her husband Rob would lay down their lives to protect him - Tiago's not so lucky. He's a boy with a hidden past. And by unhappy coincidence, Raphael's obsessive ex, cracked rocket scientist Tomas Paul Gosele, may know enough about that past to destroy everything.

Tiago clearly needs friends he can trust. His new neighbour Amelia Postthridge seems a nice enough girl, as eccentric scientists go. But Amelia is mad, bad and dangerous to know, and pursuing her own ambitious agenda. She's going to win the Nobel Prize with the world's ultimate apple, and she'll happily chew Tiago up and spit out the pips to achieve her aim.

Beauty, Love and Justice may be in short supply for our hero in this climate of ambition and deceit but when the heart speaks what's a boy to do?

Alcina Faraday is a scientist, businesswoman and stepmother who writes literary fiction about the redeeming power of love and the disturbing possibilities of modern scientific reality. Her Spiral Wound Trilogy Beauty, Love and Justice, These Modern Girls and The Commodity Fetish follows a cultured rabble of unhinged, uncool, reality-averse GenX/Y outliers as they seek success and heroism, survive squalor and indignity, have a few laughs, and mostly emerge relatively unscathed from the moshpit of modern life in Paris, London and Lisbon. Alcina lives in London and Devon with her engineer husband and a small colony of palmate newts.