If anyone comes looking, Suffolk’s Wendell Cooper can generally be found in pretty specific places.

The agronomist might be inspecting a farmer’s peanut or cotton field. The outdoorsman might be on Chuckatuck Creek, the Blackwater River or exploring an old logging trail in the Great Dismal Swamp.

During the past three years, if someone wanted to find Cooper at night, the dad and first-time novelist would most likely have been crouched behind a laptop in the farmhouse where he lives off Pruden Boulevard.

After his divorce, Cooper and his two daughters came here about three years ago.

“We moved over here, and for three years I was here in the evenings, waiting for them to get home from dates,” he said.

With lots of time alone in a new place, after 25 years writing agricultural technical manuals — something else he does to pay the bills — Cooper started working in earnest on his first novel.

The self-published “The Pearl Spider,” featuring Vietnam War draft-dodger Karl Haus, became available last fall.

Cooper, 54, said he wanted to write about America’s former biological weapons program, ended by President Nixon in 1969.

To evade Vietnam, Lt. K. Hause cuts a deal with the CIA to develop a toxin for a new biological weapon.

“It’s a huge overlap between the research involved in the weapons program and agriculture, but if you weren’t in one or the other, you wouldn’t know that,” Cooper said. “Some of the agricultural chemicals we still use were actually developed by the military.”

Cooper said he missed Vietnam by about a decade, but older friends were in it. “I had co-workers who were in it, and they told me a lot about it,” he said.

“My thought process was: ‘What would I do to get out of it?’ Cooper said, adding he wouldn’t have wanted to go and fight in the jungle on the other side of the world.

In the end, Cooper said, Haus finds his means of evading the war in Vietnam is almost as dangerous as what he evaded.

Amazon has made it easier for writers to publish their own works but also increased the field competing for the attention of readers, according to Cooper.

“If you have a creative streak at all and want to do something creative, it’s an avenue that wasn’t available 30 years ago,” he said.

Cooper said he will self-publish another novel in the next three months, unrelated to Lt. K. Haus, followed by three more installments in the Haus thriller series over the next three years.

For more information, visit www.amazon.com and search for “Wendell Cooper.”