Chain Thinking - A SmallTown® Mystery

Shep Harrington notices a cloud of dust rising above the trees that line the dirt road to his house. Moments later, a car speeds out of the plume, its rear end fishtailing in the soft dirt. If Shep had known who was in the car and why, if he could have foreseen how allowing this visitor into his home was going to affect his life, he might have gone inside and refused to answer the door, for only bad news travels this fast and this early.

The uninvited visitor is Sydney Vail, a former soap opera star turned animal activist. With her is Kikora, a young chimpanzee. Sydney begs Shep to take care of Kikora, promising that he need does so only for a few days. What Sydney fails to mention is that Kikora was stolen from DMI , a biomedical test facility, where Dr. Celia Stone, its lead scientist, had recently been bludgeoned to death. Sydney doesn't return. Instead, she is arrested for Celia Stone's murder, and Kikora is sent back to DMI to be used as a test subject in trials of a new diet drug, a process that is likely to kill her.

Did Sydney really kill Stone? Should Kikora die so DMI can market a new diet drug? Shep's pursuit of the answers to these questions involves him a murder case that's more about power than justice - a pursuit that starkly reveals the plight of laboratory chimpanzees and other primates. Yet the book is neither preachy nor self-absorbed. The book's main character and its likeable narrator, Shep Harrington, deals with all the legal and moral issues with his own brand of questioning objectivity and wit. Readers are told a riveting murder-driven story, while left to decide for themselves how the legal and moral questions about the treatment of primates should be answered.