Biography: LAUREEN PELTIER
Laureen Peltier was born in central Wisconsin in a lake home that offered no electricity or indoor plumbing. She spent her childhood exploring the woods where she developed a deep understanding of ecology and the need to maintain nature’s delicate balance.
She wrote her first play when she was seven years old and began to seriously study writing in early adulthood. Along that journey, she discovered her voice, and has spent years practicing her craft. “I believe every writer is the tool and the book the vehicle,” she says. “It is our job, as writers, to create the emotions, not experience them.”
While her fulltime career takes her into the sophisticated world of high-level bank management, her true passion is for researching and writing fiction. She commutes to her job in the city from a home she designed and helped build herself in the deep woods of Minnesota, retaining her spiritual connection to nature.
Laureen is the successful author of several highly acclaimed short novels (independently published andsold) and numerous magazine articles.
Synopsis: THE LAST HARVEST by Laureen Peltier
Imagine a worldwide food crisis. Imagine the United States, the world’s largest agriculture producer, suddenly unable to grow crops. Imagine drought and famine in America. Such a scenario exists in The Last Harvest, an 85,000-word environmental suspense novel.
It is spring and America is in the midst of a devastating three-year drought that now causes severe dust storms that bury entire cities. As conventional crops fail, America faces a terrible food crisis. BioStar Industries, the nation’s leading agricultural biotechnology firm that is responsible for new drought-resistant biocrops, seems the only answer to save the food supply. The only problem: The FDA hasn’t approved the biocrops for human consumption.
That is exactly how Professor Dryden Henderson wants it to stay. The leading expert on weather modification and the only person to have successfully seeded clouds on a mass scale, Henderson wants nothing to do with genetically modified foods, the government or science. Recently widowed, he blames genetic modification for his wife’s cancer. Grieving and disillusioned, he turns his back on the rainmaking science that both defined and betrayed him.
The USDA’s new idealistic Chief Meteorologist, Ms. Joey Little has other plans. She sees weather modification as an innovative means to end the expanding drought and save the food supply. As she tries to convince Henderson that the United States needs his scientific knowledge, she discovers that the new biocrops are exacerbating the drought. An unlikely partnership with Henderson is formed. In a frantic race against time, the two embark on a journey that takes them from Washington D.C. to the dangerous jungles of Colombia.
Politically ambitious Secretary of Agriculture Douglas White wants genetically modified food to dominate the world market. In a global strategic game of exports and imports, White contrives to increase the network of dependency of countries relying on US grains by creating a need for genetically modified crops. But there is an even darker side to White’s scheme. In an over-populated world, White understands that population control is paramount to the United States survival, as it cannot feed the world or continue to meet the demands of a burgeoning population. He uses his high-level position and the devastating drought to launch his plan.
But the new biocrops pose an even greater threat as the food supply is contaminated by an unknown allergen. Left without enough food to feed the existing population, strict rationing begins, the U.S. borders are closed, and the battle for survival begins. Can the very science that caused this crisis also be the answer to save the last harvest?
Genetically modified food and agricultural biotechnology have generated considerable interest and controversy in the United States and around the world, raising questions about environmental and food safety issues. The Last Harvest is a strong character-driven and timely novel that demonstrates a deeply frightening scenario of where science and technology have the power to take us.
Manuscript:
March 17, 2006
She was dying.
Dryden Henderson stood suspended in the doorway of his wife’s hospital room, trying to absorb the words that had suddenly flashed into his mind. During the two years Katie Henderson had been battling metastatic breast cancer, he had never allowed the mortal diagnosis to grow beyond a shadowy whisper. One more treatment, another new medicine, herbs, rituals – he had been holding fate at bay with worry beads and prayers, trying to outrun the truth that now stared backed at him with undeniable clarity from the bed.
Once the thought announced in his brain, he could not erase it. The evidence lay stark against the white hospital sheets, in the paper thin skin stretched across the haggard face, in the dull weariness of the gray eyes, and in the listless strands of hair that clung with determination to an ever-waning auburn mane.
My Katie is dying….
