You Know Who Mark Harmon is, Right?
By C. Hope Clark
When you think of mysteries, crime, and agents, the routine acronyms come to mind like FBI, CIA, DEA, and ATF. The more arrogant Secret Service guys like to roll out their name and not use initials. Then not all that long ago, we learned about NCIS, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service . . . and Mark Harmon!
But I became aware of another group of federal agents when I signed on with the US Department of Agriculture, and at first blush I wondered what the heck agents with guns and badges were doing around cows and corn, tractors and silos. But when a client offered me a bribe, I learned quickly that crime exists wherever there’s motive and money, even in the country, even within the Ag Department.
The Offices of Inspector General (OIG) quietly exist for all federal agencies, Smithsonian, Transportation, Health and Human Services, etc. But I took particular interest in the Ag Agents since that was my dominion, and I soon learned they could throw cuffs on a culprit as effectively as any FBI agent. So why not open up a new world of crime in a unique mystery series?
Carolina Slade is offered a bribe in Lowcountry Bribe, and she meets Senior Special Agent Wayne Largo with USDA OIG. The culprit? A hog farmer.
Say what? Farmers aren’t like that. Hah! Farmers can be bad guys like anyone else, and this hog producer proved it over and over in the first book of this series. Human blood doesn’t look much different than hog blood, now does it? Our IG agent waded in amongst the muck to help our stumbling yet hardheaded protagonist crack this case.
Then Tidewater Murder drew Slade into the South Carolina Lowcountry amidst tomatoes and shrimp. Drugs and migrant workers caused quite a stir, and we learned that agriculture can get deadly in a hurry.
The term agriculture agent raises visions of cowboy hats, boots, and straw out the corner of someone’s mouth, but as redneck as the role may sound, they are legit. Some of their real cases include:
- Prosecuting Sarah Lee for selling bad meat leading to a Listeriosis outbreak, killing 15 people and sickening over a hundred.
- Breaking up dog fighting rings, to include the Michael Vick case.
- Nabbing a meal and veal exporter who dumped tainted meat on Japan, who then shut down its borders to American meat imports for six months.
- Arresting meat suppliers for dumping uninspected and tainted meat into school cafeterias.
- Busting horse owners and trainers for cruel and illegal practices on horses bred for show.
- Nailing people putting sewing machine needles into food.
- Cuffing a feed supplier for tainting calf feed with formaldehyde.
Theft, conspiracy, fraud, embezzlement, even murder, bribery and smuggling. It gets bad in many colorful ways the average urban dweller doesn’t fully comprehend.
And now we have Carolina Slade’s newest release Palmetto Poison, where we learn that politics and peanuts can overlap in a bad way. The idea of Palmetto Poison came from the Agriculture OIG’s press release archive, when a produce inspector took bribes under the table to allow substandard products to pass through inspection.
Such action sounds little more than greedy, but can result in serious consequences. Bad peanuts may just sound like a nasty taste, but high levels of mold, fungal, and moisture can make them deadly.
Salmonella can actually wait dormant in that innocent jar of peanut butter until it hits the perfect growth environment, the human stomach. And if inspections get too far out of hand, more serious illnesses rise to the surface, like aflatoxin. Not a common scenario in the protected US of A, thus making it an opportune plot tool in Palmetto Poison, but in third world countries, many die from these cancer-causing peanuts that destroy a liver.
Whenever you have money, subsidies, or profits in the picture, you have crime. While it’s not palatable to think of our food infected with something that could kill us, the potential exists for large-scale tampering. While some mysteries poison the drinking water or substitute flu vaccines with crazy virulent strains of disease, Carolina Slade’s plots scare us where we feel safe, where we don’t expect crime to hit. And the agents in the mix specialize in that arena.
USDA’s OIG might not have a Mark Harmon yet, but I suspect we’ll see one downstream. And if you’ve read any of Slade’s stories, you’ll immediately wonder who could play the luscious Senior Special Agent Wayne Largo. I know I do. And since I married the agent in my bribery investigation, he’s rather intrigued as to who would play him, too!
BIO
Palmetto Poison is C. Hope Clark’s latest in The Carolina Slade Mystery Series. Hope is also editor of FundsforWriters.com, a website recognized by Writer’s Digest for its 101 Best Websites for Writers for the past 13 years. www.fundsforwriters.com / www.chopeclark.com
Check out C. Hope Clark’s newest release – PALMETTO POISON – today from Amazon!
Just Click the Link!!
