Mutant pigs, evolving in a wild, forested area cause havoc on a tropical island in the South China Sea. The pigs were originally meant for organ transplants performed on older Americans who will pay anything for a new life. As the main characters become involved in deadly and very bloody experiences, they uncover the perverse secrets of the head of the Piper family, a wealthy old Bostonian driven by greed, and the Krian family, native to the island, driven by revenge, who suffers a band of headhunters to roam the area taking trophy heads at will. A thriller with an interweaving of a romantic sub-story involving Todd Weyman, ex-EPA environmentalist (unknowingly coöpted by the CIA), who falls in love with Susan Krian, a young, local mystic and amateur historian. She eventually gives in to a blood lust and an urge to become a headhunter. In another part of the Island Garrison Maclean, tropical research scientist, becomes the would-be suitor of Faith Piper, anthropologist and daughter of a wealthy Boston financier. Greg Piper, Faith's sadistic brother, a hunter and gambler, locates and procures organ donors worldwide for Dr. Montgomery Muttar, CEO and current owner of the island. Dr. Muttar looks after the resident donors, the backbone of the island's lucrative transplant business. He also spearheads the research to 'humanize' pigs as potential donors of organs in the near future. Is any of this grounded in reality? Just a few years ago Dayaks in Indonesian Borneo were slaughtering hundreds of people in Kalimantan, cutting off heads and carving out the hearts of victims. New pig breeding and genetic engineering programs are underway in the USA, and elsewhere, in a race to provide a cost effective source of organs compatible to the human species. Can or will genetic anomalies arise during this process? Buckminster Fuller perhaps answered that question when he said, "We are not nature's only experiment." Would wealthy Bostonians likely be involved in such things? That has to be one of the few points left to the reader's imagination.
About the Author: A Fulbright Scholar to both India and Malaya, John Gaudet taught at Makerere University in Kampala during the early reign of the eccentric and brutal dictator, Idi Amin, a man responsible for 100-400,000 deaths. His research, funded by the National Geographic Society, (www.field ofreeds.com) took him to Uganda and Kenya. Now married and living in the Washington, D.C. metro area, he is a full-time writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post and local magazines such as Pleasant Living, a bi-monthly magazine dealing with life in the Chesapeake Bay area. Coincidentally, John is married to the grand-daughter of the famous lion hunter and author, J.A. Hunter, whose books provide much of the inspiration for John's lectures as well as the background for an earlier novel The Iron Snake (http: //amzn.to/ZBNnOR ) a book about African railroads, rogue lions and life in colonial Kenya. The African theme makes up much of his earlier writing such as the story The Man-Eaters Didn't Die, an article accessed by over 11,000 viewers (http: //tinyurl.com/ykm6ayc) that draws on Gaudet's interest in the history of the region.