OWE is very pleased to announce that The Hot Monkey Love Trial, the second novel by our own Larry Townsend, is hot off the presses and available through Amazon. A synopsis of the book is set out below.
Also of interest is Larry’s blog about the book, The Monkey Trial Jury Room – “A place to deliberate the 1925 Scopes trial that’s reimagined in The Hot Monkey Love Trial . . . and a place for an off-the-record discussion about tampering with genes, especially human genes, and whatever else makes the real world of biotech seem fictional.”
Larry first novel was Secrets of the Wholly Grill, Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York, 2002, a satire of the software industry.
More about The Hot Monkey Love Trial:
“Bert Gropes is a reclusive 26 year-old who lives at home with his mother in the farmlands of Woodland, California. What Bert and his mother, Eugenia Gropes, don’t know until it’s too late is that before he was even born, someone genetically altered him in vitro, along with the course of his natural life. A single gene from a Libidoan monkey—an oversexed great ape native to the Caribbean’s Isle Libido—was inserted into Bert when but a wee little bit of biomaterial.
As destiny and history play out, Bert finds trouble of biblical proportions. He’s accused of terrible crimes in Tennessee for his role in the death of a thrill seeker who downloads an app developed for sexless farm roosters but that’s been repurposed by the real culprit, Dick Slayde of Internet giant Primal Urge, for human use as the ultimate electronic tonic: Hot Monkey Love. Making matters worse, Tennessee’s favorite son, Senator Ray Hoffenworth, comes home to Dayton to be the prosecuting attorney and make an example of Bert. The defense, offered by Bert’s celebrity animal rights activist lawyer, Clarene Eliza Dare, captures the world’s attention: Can a defendant with a single nonhuman gene be tried for murder as a person, as that term is understood by our laws, any more than a dog or a cat?
When the legal titans clash in court over the consequence of Bert’s mixed-up genetic sequence, it’s the Scopes Monkey Trial all over again. Except one thing: The story’s DNA has been mutated—comically and dramatically recombined with strands harvested from today’s news—and twisted into a tale that only the coming age of biotech could dish up.”