The Scallop Plot - by Judy Foreman (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In this thriller, star investigative reporter Samantha Fuller joins a feisty Cape Cod fisherwoman to foil a wind farm developer's evil plot to poison precious ocean scallop beds--and finds herself facing off against right-wing climate deniers.

In Provincetown, MA, feisty scallop fisherwoman Isabella Ferreira goes up against a sleazy wind farm developer, Olaf Svensson, who wants to install wind turbines in the ocean right off the coast of Cape Cod.

At a nearby scallop hatchery, marine biologists Leif and Astrid Borgen are already using the new gene editing technique CRISPR to insert a growth hormone gene into scallop embryos to make them bigger and thus more profitable--all of which is legal. But unbeknownst to the hatchery owner, Svensson is also paying the pair to insert another gene--one that causes PSP, paralytic shellfish poisoning. If this works, no one will ever eat scallops from this site again, thus freeing it up for Svensson's turbines.

Enter Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Times reporter Samantha Fuller. Together with Isabella, she slowly uncovers Svensson's deadly plot--but not before hundreds of people die. Along the way, love blossoms, tragedies occur, and the subtleties of the pro- and anti-wind power groups are exposed.

About the Author

Judy Foreman is a former Boston Globe health columnist and the author of three works of nonfiction from Oxford University Press. In 2022, she published her first novel, CRISPR'd, from Skyhorse Publishing. A Wellesley College grad (Phi Beta Kappa), she spent three years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Brazil and has a master's from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was a Lecturer on Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a Fellow in Medical Ethics, also at Harvard Medical School, a Knight Science Fellow at MIT, and a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. She has won more than fifty journalism awards, including a George Foster Peabody Award and a Science in Society award from the National Association of Science Writers. She lives outside of Boston with her husband.