Book Spotlight | Land Marks by Maryann Lesert

Today is Earth Day and the spotlight is on Land Marks by Maryann Lesert.

This is a timely eco-thriller about four activists driven to save Michigan’s forests from fracking. If you’re a fan of stories about climate change and eco-anxiety, you don’t want to miss this. The book is out now!

To give you a taste, I’m sharing the synopsis and an exclusive excerpt. Thank you to SparkPoint Studio for a review copy.

Genre: Fiction/Thriller
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 16 April 2024
Author: Maryann Lesert
Publisher: She Writes Press

Synopsis

In the river-crossed northwoods of Michigan, Kate, Brett, Sonya, and Mark, mentored by their former professor Rebecca, keep watch as North American Energy (NorA) connects a corridor of frack well sites deep in the state forests. When NorA expands in unexpected directions and their awful, bigger plan becomes clear, the action begins.

As grassroots activists gather and prepare to stop NorA’s dangerous superfrac, stresses other than the fracturing of the bedrock appear. Sonya is arrested, Rebecca reveals her hidden past, and the one person who knows both women’s stories arrives in camp. Love and solidarity want to win, even if most showdowns with Big Oil don’t end well for those who take a stand.

Suspenseful, poignant, and galvanizing, Land Marks is a tribute to the waterways that connect us, the land that sustains us, and the moments that inspire us to rise up together to say, “No more!”

Excerpt

Chapter 1 – TV Ticker

I don’t know why I turned on the television in the first place, except to provide a little white noise. It was that time of the semester when the essays were piling up, and I had heard more about my students’ lives and their problems than I could possibly carry. (Couldn’t they see the stack of essays I was hauling away from class?) After teaching all day and into the night, I didn’t want to remember the excuses or the hardships. I wanted noise, simple white noise.

I climbed the dark carpeted steps to my second-story apartment, thinking about the one man who had ever shared the space with me. It was Sam who suggested the golden yellow color we painted the entryway and dinette. Recalling our better days, I strolled through my tiny dinette, loving those golden yellow walls and the drop-sided table with two wooden chairs. I knew what I was doing, indulging in the escapism of romance. This was the time in every semester when I started thinking about getting a dog, maybe even dating again.

Sam had been so attuned to color. The landlord loved the pinky salmon he’d picked out to trim the exterior window casings. She said they made the windows pop, and she credited me two months’ rent for our labor. Sam was fit and active and he loved to be outdoors, but I soon discovered that he didn’t love the trees or the darkness of wet soil or the ways different leaves let go of water. He loved moving through the outdoors, preferably on wheels and as fast as possible. Why I needed to stand under a white pine, touching its trunk with one hand and my heart with the other, was something he would never understand.

I opened one of those tart red wine-beers and passed back through that golden yellow dinette before I paid the television any attention, but as soon as I saw the face on the screen, the smooth beige of her skin and the short haircut that brought her sandy brown hair up in curls, I knew. It was Sonya. One of them had finally done it—gotten themselves arrested.

There was nothing more than a ticker below her photo. “Woman arrested, possibly child, sabotage at northern Michigan frack well site. Details at eleven.”

My first thought was, Hank? Why on earth would they have Hank out there with them? And then I was annoyed with yet another demonstration of right-now journalism’s grammatical failures: possibly child? Did that mean there was one person arrested whose age was in doubt? Were there actually two people in custody, one adult and one child? And how could you have someone possibly in custody?

The weight of the bag of essays still hanging from my arm came to me, and viewing those essays in a whole new light, I lifted them gently over the back of the couch. If I hadn’t been overwhelmed by the thought of adding another twenty to the pile of sixty already stacked and waiting, I never would have turned on the TV. I would have missed this.

Eventually, Brett or Kate or Mark would have called or texted; at least I hoped so. The last time we talked we agreed to stay in touch but not too closely. They hadn’t taken that to heart, had they? My suggestion for distance? I didn’t mean for them to go silent on me.

I sat in front of the old television that I only occasionally used for weather reports, trying to find some patience with the converter box. Part of me used to enjoy watching Sam fight with the rabbit ears, him begging me to get cable and a flat panel. By the time that first winter had set in, his love for color wasn’t enough, and I asked him to leave.

The Live at Eleven teaser began with a quick zoom to a headshot of Sonya. It was oddly small, as if the station had gotten hold of a school or license photo and quickly scanned it in, but her classically proportioned face, the smile that could have come from an archaic Greek sculpture, was unmistakable. The text ran again. “Woman arrested, possibly child, northern Michigan frack well site,” before a live shot of what looked to be a tree-lined clearing.

I sat forward, scanning the graying bands of darkness that faded back from the light stack on the news truck, searching for the telltale pink and orange flags, the lights, the noise of a well pad, but there was nothing. Justin Thompson, the same spiky-haired reporter who had covered their Winter Campout, swept his arm over a dark, empty field as he entered the shot, backed by a tree line like any in northern Michigan, mixed hardwoods and pines.

“Justin Thompson reporting from a northern county frack well site where at least one person has been arrested in what appears to be attempted sabotage. Stay tuned for the full report at eleven.”

Had they somehow managed to get Thompson into their fold? He had to have known to end up hitting the story from what appeared to be an empty, half-excavated field.

They were good. I had been exceptionally proud of the protests and events they had planned. But I also knew, as they stepped closer and closer to direct action, how things could go wrong. Were they trusting a news guy to wait for the right time? What a coup that would be.

Had someone tipped Thompson off?

Thompson had seemed sympathetic when he’d covered their Winter Campout. He’d gotten quite a bit of screen time, too, thanks to the bizarre thunderstorms that came out of January’s snow clouds. He called the report “Environmentalists Occupy Frack Well Site,” and for a new reporter, he had gotten some unforgettable shots. In one day’s time, temperatures had plummeted, falling from nearly sixty degrees to near zero, ending a heat streak that was way too warm for a January thaw. Snow clouds rolled in off the lake, filled with pinkish red lightning, and a rather new meteorological term came into vogue: thundersnow. The icy snow, blowing across the field as a constant presence, held on to light and sound for long periods of time, elongating the rumble of thunder and the lightning’s eerie pink glow.

There was a flash as Thompson wrapped up his winter report, and both he and Brett had ducked as pink light flickered overhead and remained. The camera panned the campers’ tents, orange and green glow worms in the windblown field, and when asked what the group wanted, Brett had taken the opportunity to connect fracking and all sorts of unconventional extraction methods—boiling bitumen in open pits, steaming it up from the ground, blowing the tops off mountains—to our third January of thundersnows. “This,” he had said, pointing to a night sky swelling with morning-like light, “is the very real face of climate change.”

Cover photo by Thom Holmes