Ashwood

In the decade following the horrible depression of the 2020s, hard work and determination have brought a sense of security to Anne Hartford and her extended family. Finally, no one on the estate experiences hunger, everyone has a warm bed and the children receive a good education. The residents of the U.S. metropolitan areas may not fare as well. A nation that so recently experienced hunger and deprivation could be devastated again, if rumors of government trading of precious agricultural commodities prove to be true. A diminished population has caused government, private industry and the military to compete for labor. In looking at the rich fields of the Ashwood estate, Anne Hartford's greatest concern is finding people who can harvest the crops in 2037, now that government-assigned labor is no longer available. Suddenly, Anne's husband is abducted while on a Department of Energy trip to South American. A strange bureaucrat arrives at Ashwood, allegedly to manage media interests. Dual scandals rock her family as well as the country, posing troubling questions about the rights of children, the role of big government and the self-determination of individuals.

The Ashwood trilogy ends three decades after failure of the global economy. The big question is answered. If world leaders had the opportunity to build from scratch, what would happen? At the half point of the twenty-first century, corporate spinners say: ''The vote of a shareholder is a commitment to building a better world, while the vote of a citizen is an uneducated guess.''

"Cynthia Kraack's immediately transfixing Ashwood deftly swings us into a not-too-distant future of limited natural resources and unlimited challenges, and into the life of a young government worker beginning an assignment as matron of an agricultural estate, where being certain of who you are, who's watching you, and whom to trust is as hard as the winter further isolating her foreboding new home and the unexpected family it comes to contain." –Suzanne Strempek Shea, author of Becoming Finola