New Edition Of Slatewiper Available January 1, 2024


Free at Kindle Select and also available in paperback.

As the clock clicks swiftly down, biotech entrepreneur Lara Blackwood races to stop ultra-right-wing extremists from using her stolen gene technology to start an ethnic purge that would kill billions worldwide — all for them to keep their bloodline “unpolluted.”

Slatewiper is science-based thriller I originally wrote in the mid-1990s. It went unpublished because publishers thought the premise was too far-fetched.

Then world events caught up with publisher doubts at the turn of the century when  international medical groups and even the CIA began to issue warning about gene weapons.

Because of this and the relentless effort by my literary agent Natasha Kern, Slatewiper was finally published in hardcover by Macmillan/Forge in 2003.

And now,  twenty years later, the Chinese intelligence agency —  at the end of October, 2023 –issued a warning whose details underpin Slatewiper.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

Humanity’s very existence is at stake in this latest hair-raiser by Perdue (Daughter of God, Forge 2000), a no-holds-barred biogenetic thriller. Lara Blackwood, founder of GenIntron, a company devoted to gene manipulation as a method of fighting genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and sickle-cell anemia, is a tough hybrid of brilliant scientist, beauty and fighter.

As the novel begins, GenIntron has been forced into economic difficulty and bought by the internationally powerful Japanese Daiwa Ichiban Corporation and its racist head, Tokutaro Kurata. In his first move, Kurata perverts Blackwood’s work by creating a new genetic weapon, graphically named Slatewiper, with which he intends to rid Tokyo of its hated Korean immigrants.

Thousands of dead Koreans fill the streets, and puzzled doctors postulate a new and unknown disease. Kurata dreams of reviving Japanese militarism, refusing to acknowledge defeat in WWII and denying the horrifying Japanese atrocities of that war and earlier Asian wars. He plans to sell the deadly gene to nations wishing to eliminate their own minorities, or for use against enemies, while plotting to promote Japanese superiority and racial purity.

Aiding Kurata is Blackwood’s nemesis, Sheila Gaillard, as beautiful and brilliant as Blackwood and altogether deadly, and Kurata’s nephew and heir, American-taught Akira Sugawara, loyal but finally driven to rebellion by the horrors he witnesses. In the light of current medical epidemics, this is a timely offering. (July) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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