Shep Harrington Smalltown Mystery

Imagine you’re in your late 20s. School is behind you. You have money, a beautiful wife, lots of friends. Everything you ever wanted is at your fingertips. And then suddenly, it’s all taken from you. Shep Harrington was a young, prosperous, and happy lawyer, his bright future shining on the horizon like a beacon. But things that shine are not always what they seem. Contentment can be intoxicating, dulling the senses to the signs of change. He and wife Anna were living their dream - together. And then they weren't.

Syndey Vail, once a beautiful soap opera star, now has a passion for championing the rights of animals - but she keeps the controversial methods of her cause as shrouded as she keeps her partially disfigured face. Sydney enters lawyer-cum-detective Shep Harrington’s life in a cloud of dust and vanishes just as quickly, leaving behind two very different but strangely connected things: A chimpanzee and a murder. The chimpanzee is the young Kikora, whom Sydney liberated from her confining cage in a testing lab at DMI.

It was eugenics that compelled white doctors to attempt to murder Baby John. It was compassion that led to his kidnapping. And it is the cruelest of circumstances - the murder of Jennifer Rice - that 50 years later leads Shep Harrington to search for Baby John. As Shep soon learns, the quest brings him to the top of a slippery slope with an ill-defined edge. Question begets question, and the slide down the slope proves inevitable: What happened to the baby? Who took it? Why was he taken? And who killed Jennifer Rice?