LITMIR.BIZ

      Dear Reader,

      Have you ever heard of Svalbard? I hadn’t either until a few years ago when I learned it’s an archipelago halfway between Norway and the North Pole. There, on an uninhabited island, is located what may well be mankind’s most important structure—a state-of-the-art storage facility built inside a frozen mountain. To store what? Seeds. Millions of varieties of seeds collected from around the world. If a monumental disaster, natural or man-made, should ever occur to our crops, here are preserved in this Global Seed Vault the seeds to begin anew.

      The more I read about Svalbard, the more intrigued I became. Those who have read my romantic suspense books know that I like to build my stories around unique subjects. The Bounty Hunter’s Forbidden Desire is one of those stories. It concerns a man and a woman who race to save an international seed vault threatened with destruction by a megalomaniac—a seed vault that in my novel is situated in Alaska, not Norway. As fast-paced as the plot is, this is not its major theme. That deals with a guilt-ridden hero searching for his missing brother and the romance that was never supposed to happen. Here’s a hint before you take this journey with Haley and Chase. You won’t need a dogsled. It can be quite warm in Alaska in the summer. And with Haley and Chase heating up the environment…well, you get the idea.

      Jean Thomas