Road Trip — Grace Jelsnik

The Road Trip to Hell and Back Dr. Noah Severson, veterinarian and reluctant environmentalist, must expose the devastation unleashed on the environment by hydraulic fracturing, "fracking," of the subsurface shale by a greedy gas company and its silent partner, the Environmental Protection Agency. Victoria Winslow, heiress and socialite, long obscured by the shadow cast by her legendary mother, seeks her true identity on the open road, behind the wheel of her father's new Jaguar. Thomas, thirteen-year-old recently orphaned runaway, searches for the brother who was stripped from him by the man pretending to be his uncle. Mule, English mastiff and unwitting drug smuggler, wants relief from the agony caused by the million dollars' worth of drug-filled condoms clogging his digestive tract. Ricky, four-year-old kidnapped orphan, waits for his brother to rescue him from the outlaw biker who kidnapped him. A road trip that begins in Denver becomes a race to Evergreen when these five take a collision course to their respective destinies, and Noah, Victoria, Thomas, Mule, and Ricky find themselves the target of an outlaw motorcycle gang, an unscrupulous sheriff, Colombian drug smugglers, oil industry enforcers, and EPA specialists. The asphalt between Billings, Montana, and Evergreen, Colorado, is littered with bodies by the time they reach their final destination. Grace Jelsnik, author of Tranquility (hazardous waste disposal), White Girl (genetically modified organisms), Dominoes (religious zealotry), and Sparrow (rump militias), takes on her greatest challenge to date in Road Trip, a tale of a nation gone mad in its attempt to free itself from dependence on foreign fuel.