Alisa Lynn Valdés's "Hollow Beasts"

Alisa Lynn Valdés is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist and a former staff writer for both the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. With more than one million books in print in eleven languages, she was included on Time’s list of the twenty-five most influential Hispanics and was a Latina woman of the year as well as an Entertainment Weekly breakout literary star. She is the author of many novels, including Playing with Boys and The Husband Habit.

Here Valdés dreamcasts the lead for an adaptation of her new novel, Hollow Beasts:

My novel Hollow Beasts is the first book in a suspense/crime series centered around Jodi Luna, a middle aged Latina game warden in northern New Mexico. (For a simple shorthand, she’s my Walt Longmire or Joe Pickett.)

Jodi comes to the job of game warden at age 45, as the oldest rookie conservation officer ever hired by the New Mexico Fish & Wildlife Department, after a long career as a nature poet and poetry professor.

Jodi is in love with the wilderness and all the things that live out there, and heartbroken by the way humanity has exploited and disregarded nature. In the era of climate change, she decided nature needs more than poetry; it needs warriors.

That said, Jodi is not the usual environmental activist stereotype. She’s a proud hunter. She loves fly fishing. She is a genuine conservationist who despises nothing more than animal poaching and trophy hunting. She does not fit the stereotype of an American outdoorsman or conservationist, either, in that she is a woman of color.

Jodi is complicated and nuanced, intelligent, furious and layered. She’s the hero I feel we all need now, and the only kind of cop we need more of. Game wardens are the only law enforcement officers whose job is to protect wildlife from human beings. Sometimes, the corrupt system leads her to resort to violent vigilantism. Jodi’s achilles heel is her strong emotions, most of all her rage. She also drinks too much. She’s imperfect, if well intentioned.

The perfect person to play Jodi on the screen would be Gina Torres. Gina is the same age as Jodi, and has a gift for playing characters who are deeply intelligent, powerful, and kickass. She’s beautiful, with great range. As a black Latina she also has the potential to appeal to a wide audience in playing a New Mexico Hispana with a family tree whose five centuries in the region are as complex and rich as the history of this part of the world. Fingers crossed! I’m a fan, and hope to find a way to work with her on this.

Visit Alisa Lynn Valdés's website.

--Marshal Zeringue