Environmental terrorism is a hot topic in the news these days and ecoterrorism provides the back story for LONG RUN HOME, a 320 page romantic ecosuspense novel about two enemies, suddenly allies, confronting the past together.

        SAMANTHA NEALLY is in hiding. Abandoned at eleven by her mother, seduced and pregnant at twenty by a man who implicated her in a terrorist bombing, she’s lived alone in the desert for ten years. But all that is about to change.

        Afraid the FBI or her former ecoterrorist friends will find her, she sent her child far away at birth to be raised by her sister. Alone now for ten years, Sam has carved out a solitary life on a small ranch off the Indian Reservation in Northern Nevada. Injured in her role in the bombing, she’s turned her disability into an asset, running through the desert, gathering herbs to sell on the Internet.

        Recently learning her mother did not abandon her and her sister nineteen years ago, but instead was murdered, Sam is struggling to reassess her interpretation of herself and her choices.  When a stranger, Joe Thorp, appears in her world, Sam makes a decision to cast off her former fears and trust Thorp.

        Within days, undercover FBI agent, Joe Roper, in the guise of Joe Thorp, insinuates himself into Sam’s life, into her bed, and then betrays her. Captured and forced to choose between prison time for her past crimes or assisting the FBI, Sam agrees to work with Roper to capture her former ecoterrorist friends.

        Thrown together once more, Sam and Roper’s relationship grows and a new trust develops when Roper helps Sam search for answers to her mother’s murder. As the FBI sting operation proceeds, Sam and Roper begin to envision a future together, unaware that the real threat to Sam’s life is waiting offstage.

        Flushed out of hiding when Sam digs into the past and her mother’s murder, Evan Parry is intent on protecting his identity by eliminating Sam Neally. Waiting until Roper is busy with the FBI sting, Parry coerces Sam into meeting him, with a promise that he can shed light on her mother’s murder. The meeting immediately turns deadly as Sam is kidnapped and taken into the desert, where Evan Parry sets out to rape and kill her.

        Trapped by Parry, Sam is faced once more with the powerlessness of a life shaped by fear and lies. She confronts the killer, saves herself and in that discovers a new strength and freedom for her life, free from the lies and interpretations of the past.

Injured, but standing in the possibility of a new future, Sam sets out on a LONG RUN HOME, towards a life with her child and Roper.

LONG RUN HOME finaled in the 2005 Indiana Golden Opportunity Contest and is currently being considered for publication.