Prismatic is the debut thriller by Edwina Grey. It's a "what if" scenario that unleashes a dangerous virus on an unsuspecting Sydney starting an epidemic that has the potential to grow to pandemic proportions. It's a story that builds in intensity but I had a lot of difficulty coming to grips with the writing style and this somewhat lessened the impact.

Jacqueline Cooper with the help of a man named Daniel O'Connor is doing some digging on the banks of the Lane Cove River in Sydney's northern suburbs. She had heard about a species of mould that is particular to that spot and finding it would help with a paper she is writing. What she and Daniel find instead is something of far greater impact that will have devastating ramifications for the entire city. Quite unbeknown to Jacqueline and Daniel, they have unleashed a kind of evil that had been trapped for around 100 years.

Upon discovering the bodies the police are called but it's pretty obvious that these people died around 100 years ago so the police simply take cursory looks at the site and short statements before moving on. But soon after, incidents involving the police who attended the scene begin to filter out to the public. One beat a motorist to death after a routine traffic stop, another had to be shot when he went wild inside a police station and the third was suddenly prone to unprecedented fits of rage. The virus was spreading and no one really knew what it was or where it came from.

Prismatic is a story that is told in 3 parts, each told piecemeal in succeeding chapters. The story opens with the present day discovery by Jackie and Daniel. Then we're taken back to 1919 and an emergency summons for a doctor living in the Blue Mountains to come down to Sydney to deal with a mystery flu epidemic that has broken out in a returned serviceman's hospital at Lane Cove. Finally, we're taken back to 1889, the year after Sydney was settled and we meet a group of freed convicts who become aware of a mystery illness that is killing the 'indians' and has already sent one of their friends mad.

I found that I had a real problem connecting with the plot in this book. The time setting constantly jumped one period to the next, often picking up way after the point where it had previously left off. A typical example of the kind of thing I'm talking about is in the present, we end a chapter after discovering a couple of corpses and then, when we return a few chapters later it's - whoa momma, we've got ourselves a full-blown epidemic on our hands here, how the heck did that happen?

Similarly, there are hard to follow jumps in the other time periods too, so not only do we have to remember what happened three chapters ago, but we also have to project that knowledge forward because each storyline has moved on significantly. I constantly felt as though I was fighting a losing battle just to keep up...and I had to do it with three stories at the same time.

For all the jumping around that takes place in the way the story is told it never really feels as though any progress is made. Most of the big events take place while we are focussing on another time period and are merely inferred, usually in discussions between characters. And as for the characters, there was not one with whom I felt any affinity with consequently I ultimately didn't care about their fate.

Prismatic is a good concept that was bogged down by a storyline that just doesn't flow. The idea of an epidemic being unleashed on an unsuspecting world was never really effectively sold to make it seem as though what we were reading could actually become reality.