
After her department head turns against her, she teams up with Kevin, a former C.I.A. The novel’s wily protagonist, who goes by Alex, is a brilliant, paranoid chemist, trained to torture terrorism suspects with her excruciating artisanal chemical cocktails. It’s like, after ice cream, you want pretzels.” “Stories kind of run out, and you want to do something very different. “I get a little bored,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Arizona. Meyer decide to write a pulpy spy thriller, an ultramasculine genre that is notoriously tough to break into, particularly for female authors? The movies have made more than $3 billion worldwide, and that’s not even counting all the “Team Jacob” and “Team Edward” T-shirts and other merchandise. “ Twilight” became one of the publishing industry’s most lucrative entertainment franchises, with four novels, a companion novella and five blockbuster films. Meyer, whose young-adult vampire novels have sold more than 155 million copies globally and helped spur an entire booming subgenre called paranormal romance. It is a stark and unexpected departure for Ms. So a lot of fans were surprised to learn that her new book, “The Chemist,” published this week, is a grisly, twisted thriller about a highly skilled female interrogator who goes into hiding after her bosses at a secret government agency try to kill her. (Her 2008 novel, “The Host,” centered on parasitic aliens that occupy human bodies, and even that was too blandly terrestrial for some readers.)


Stephenie Meyer’s millions of fans have come to expect certain supernatural flourishes from her novels, which feature shape-shifters, vampires and werewolves, even vampire-werewolf hybrids.
