HARD NUT Books

A man gives a lift to an unusual hitchhiker, a woman who has been thrown bound and naked from a car. On the journey he hears the bizarre but intriguing story of her predicament. It seems that there is nobody who could be the father of her child, least of all her rich powerful and vindictive husband.

Mark de Vries has a passion for studying lions and for several months each year he teaches Zoology at an English University. The rest of his time he spends with his research team in a tiny settlement in the remote Kalahari Desert amidst a group of tribal Tswana. Against his will, Mark is drawn into the mystery of the hitchhiker's child - until a sequence of murders, rapes, intimidation and blackmail means that his livelihood and even his survival depend on finding the answer. But it takes a brave experiment by him and his research team to finally discover the truth, an experiment that they have no choice but to conduct on themselves. When the mystery is solved it becomes clear that what happened to the hitchhiker could - without the person's knowledge -happen to anybody. And it is not only women who might suffer the consequences.

Set partly in the stifling atmosphere of English academia and partly in the dangerous and endangered wilderness of the Kalahari Desert, THE HITCHHIKER'S CHILD is a story of murder and mystery, love and sacrifice. At its heart are a love-affair between Mark and two of his students, an alternative life philosophy, and an escalating conflict between two very different men.

Robin Baker, author of the international best seller SPERM WARS, is an acknowledged authority on sexual biology and psychology. As in his previous two novels, PRIMAL and CABALLITO, the innovative sexual science behind THE HITCHHIKER'S CHILD is real and one day everybody will, and for their own sake must, know of it. But they don't know it yet.