Finding a dead mouse in the lab is not usually such a big deal. But when the lab is a Biosafety Level-3 containment facility designed to keep things in and out, and when the mouse has a brain tumor that shines green under blue light, it's time to start worrying. When the graduate students start glowing, then it's time to panic. Especially when they could be spreading a mutant virus in ways no one really understands.

Not Easy Being Green is the second in Susy Gage's "lab-lit" series featuring intrepid physicist Lori Barrow, who by historical accident finds herself in charge of her university's biocontainment facility. When she suspects that a virus that makes cells fluoresce is escaping from the lab, her first thought is to blame the motley crew of bumbling theorists trying to learn biology. But investigation reveals something even more sinister: an unscrupulous researcher with an illegal clinic preying on everyone from the vain to the desperate.