TobaccoNet

by K.E. Bombard

Description Jason Kraft, an agent in the DEA's covert operations group has just been assigned to infiltrate a large tobacco farm in New England. This farm is thought to be responsible for a special hybrid of genetically engineered tobacco, known to look and smell like normal tobacco, but it has the chemical component THC, having a similar effect to potent marijuana when smoked. It is critical that Jason finds the strain and destroys it before it hits the streets. This assignment takes him into the complex world of Connecticut shade tobacco cultivation, to infiltrate the largest farm in the region where expensive cigar wrapper leaves are grown. The FBI is also interested; they unknowingly assign Jason's former lover Alondra, to work the investigation with him. Their relationship is rekindled as they reunite for this common goal, to find the strain. Alondra, of Puerto Rican decent, develops her own agenda: to fight for equality of pay and better working conditions for the large contingent of Puerto Rican workers on the farm. She works to bring labor unions in for the first time to help establish more wages, benefits, and a better life for the seasonal Puerto Rican farm workers, who for years have struggled and have been left behind. They are both nearing their goals, but there's a dilemma: if they find the strain, the case ends and Alondra will lose the opportunity to establish unions and labor equality for the first time in the Connecticut tobacco industry. Read this book to follow Jason's and Alondra's quest to find the strain, and to learn all about how shade tobacco is grown and how children and migrant workers have sacrificed for years to make Connecticut farmers wealthy. The plot is contrived and the characters are fictional, but the descriptions of tobacco operations, activities in the fields, depictions of migrant farm labor and the plight of the workers in the Connecticut shade tobacco industry are 100 percent real.