Those who run the village are ex-cons, chief among them Jack Roderick ("Rod"), out of prison "after serving twenty years for second-degree murder." Armed with a sociology degree earned during his stay he soon finds work overseeing the village with its yearly budget of $15 million.
Enter the shady operation called The Harvester Network dealing in the buying and selling of organs, preying on those in tents, enticing them to "donate" a kidney in return for money.
The organization brokers organs for customers rich enough to pay the extravagant prices. A "doctor" performs the transplant in a room somewhere, and if the donor doesn't survive, the doctor chops them up and sends the parts to a landfill. Or so it happens in "Human Harvest" ($4.99 in paperback, self-published; also for Amazon Kindle).
Semler, a San Francisco resident for some forty years, majored in Philosophy at Chico State back in the 70s. His novel raises ethical questions, certainly, but in some sense it's about the mystery of time.
For Rod, in prison, "the days go on, they roll out, flatten, and in their heap, you finally get used to the poison of time by taking lesser amounts to get used to the poison of time. This was called many things. Resilience, mutability, getting used to not getting used, becoming a prisoner, lying in bed on a warm summer evening, unable to sleep, listening to the guttural rumble of long-haulers on Highway 50 fixated on time's flow."
Lyricism gives way to love, found and lost (mostly lost), and gross violence. As one character observes, the story is about "forgers, money launderers, murderers, unlicensed physicians, loan sharks, smugglers, cleaners, pimps, fraudsters, drug dealers, organ traffickers, arms dealers, disposers of corpses, assassins, and god knows what."
By the end, readers will be ready for a long, hot shower.
