Bare Branches

One-child rule & female infanticide unbalances the population, forcing one hundred thirty million men to live as BARE BRANCHES. Chinese scientists race social upheaval. Agents scour the globe to harvest cells. In America they hunt for Sally Luck. We dispatch a single agent only. Preferring close quarter combat to gun fights, Jillian defiantly recites Aeschylus and Shakespeare amid feats of arms..

Cai Ling Luk was raised a princess by Chinese aristocrats whose fathers fled China when Mao Zedong defeated the nationalists in 1949. Her aloof parents allow her to choose her college. She moves to America and changes her name to Sally Luck. And then, angry over pain and the foolishness of men, Sally choses hysterectomy as elective surgery, and then spends the rest of her life regretting it--until technology and global politics intervene. Soon, her children will number in the millions and she will fall a year behind in naming them, sorry for those with just a number.

Jillian de Guerre lost her father when she was five. He was a professor at Syracuse University bringing his 35 undergrads back from Britain aboard Pan Am Flight 103 when the Arabs blew it up over Lockerbie. Now all grown up, it is normally the body-count that interests Jillian. She works alone. She doesn't like to share.

The story mounts twin-scaffolds: A chronicle of wished-for love and busted love, of love postponed, and of love made pure by heat. And then, slipped among the pages like bookmarks, is a picture of the Lower Keys before Hurricane Irma wrecked them: its dive boat captains, its tiki bars, and adventure dives that the tourists never saw; in a land that's mostly sea; and in a sea that's mostly sky.