Janet Wise was born and grew up in a small rural farming community in Nebraska. As a young adult, she married, is the mother of two daughters, and began her professional life as a public education teacher of fine arts in northern California. In 1993, and now divorced, she began working in U.S. government-funded international development in Washington, DC, and for sixteen years has managed finance, administration, grants under contract, and has served as a technical writer and Deputy Chief of Party on over-seas field projects. She spent three years working on a law and democracy project in Cambodia and a year following doing research and writing in the South Pacific. Commencing on 9 September 2001, she joined an education project in India, and while living in New Delhi, worked all over the country for four and a half years. She has traveled extensively in the region, including Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Dubai, and Myranmar. Having served subsequently in the Palestinian Territories, she is currently posted in Kabul, Afghanistan. The author maintains a home base in Atlanta, GA. In 2004, Wise turned her talents to fiction. "The Black Silk Road" is her first novel.
The Black Silk Road connects the dots across the world landscape illuminating in harrowing clarity the path to 9/11. A French journalist who'd covered the Afghan war is assassinated and a child brutally maimed over evidence of U. S. weapons provided to the Middle East amounting to billions of dollars paid for by heroin. Eight years later, in 1998, the journalist's young American widow comes to Pakistan in a search for the truth, only to find herself trapped in a dangerous world of nuclear tests, terrorist attacks, covert intelligence operations, corporate power chess, attempted assassinations, and murder. And also finds that she is, once again, in love. What emerges is a rich and sensitive exploration of the Islamic culture of today as it collides with the West. The Black Silk Road gives terrorism a human face, treating the terrorism perpetrated by the Islamic East, in as honest, real, and even-handed manner, as the terrorism of the corporate, covert-intelligence-driven, militarized West.