Endangered

By Ann Littlewood

Zoo keeper Iris Oakley is sent to a remote farm in Washington State to rescue exotic animals after a drug bust. Instead of pets, she finds smuggled parrots and tortoises destined for sale to unscrupulous or unsuspecting collectors. The zoo’s facilities are full, and she ends up with two macaws shrieking in her basement. The marijuana grow operation and the meth lab are the cops’ problem. The smuggling side-line is hers. An outraged Iris is determined to break the criminal pipeline that snatches rare animals from the wild and leaves them neglected in old barns.

Then she discovers a woman who escaped the bust—dead. Iris has stumbled onto a violent crime, something far too dangerous for a widow with a young son. But it’s too late to untangle herself. Brothers from the farm, both murder suspects, invade her home, demanding information she doesn’t have.

Iris flees with her child, but soon her only option is to go on the offensive. People she counts on are not who they claim to be. A friend is shot during a break-in at the zoo and may not survive.

Hunting for the brothers, Iris sorts through baffling clues and trips over secrets old and new. Why steal an ordinary drinking glass? Why do the brothers think she knows where their father’s fortune is hidden? Could the noisy parrots be hiding crucial information in plain sight? She realizes a key piece is missing, but finding it means confronting a determined killer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781615954063

Ann Littlewood

Ann Littlewood was a zoo keeper in Portland, Oregon for twelve years. She raised lions and cougars, an orangutan; and native mammals, as well as parrots, penguins, and a multitude of owls. The financial realities of raising primates (two boys of her own) led Ann to exchange a hose and rubber boots for a briefcase and pantsuit in the healthcare industry. Ann has maintained her membership in the American Association of Zookeepers and has kept in touch with the zoo world by visiting zoos and through friendships with zoo staffers.

Reviews for Endangered

[sugarcreekranch · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the third book in the really entertaining "Zoo Mysteries" series by Ann Littlewood. Ms Littlewood has years of experience working in a zoo in Portland, OR and her experience shows in her books set in a fictional zoo in nearby Vancouver, WA.In this book, bird keeper Iris Oakley helps the zoo to take in some exotic birds and reptiles discovered at a drug raid. As the officials seem dis-interested in persuing the animal-related charges, Iris starts looking into things. And gets into danger, of course.Endangered has a lot more character development than in the prior two books. The mystery is well done. There is plenty of animal-related appeal, but there is somewhat less zoo backdrop than in prior books.

[stewartry · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It makes for great fun when a writer can draw from direct experience of an uncommon career to create an uncommon series. Zoos are an alien landscape to me – the logistics involved in housing and maintaining dozens of species of wildly varying requirements are completely beyond me, but Ann Littlewood can write of it with the almost casual authority of someone who's lived it. Her Portland zookeeper Iris Oakley lives and breathes the life. The story follows her into all areas of the zoo, and it's fascinating. She also lives and breathes the life of a single (widowed) mother of a small child, and the complications and joys of that are threaded through the book. This is one of the more realistic depictions of making do without a whole lot of money that I've seen, especially in the mystery genre; it seems like too often characters in "cozies" skip merrily along, opportunities or legacies landing in their laps at just the perfect moment; to read about a woman forced to think twice about a major opportunity because (not to spoil too much) preparing for it would be too expensive – that's rare. Also rare is the sort of relationship Iris has with her parents. Too often writers fall back on what has become a cliché – adult bickers with parents and avoids them at all costs. There is bickering here – but the reasons are provided, and the relationship is deepened, and is filled with corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an already convincing narrative. Her role as a widowed mother, harried and worried and head-over-heels in love with her son while still realizing he's not a dream to handle, is utterly authentic. All of the relationships are mature (or becoming so) and believable – and, in the case of that with her best friend, a little heart-breaking. Happily, the mystery aspect of the book is plausible as well. Although Iris literally stumbles over the body in question, she does not seem to be the sort of character who will do so on a regular basis like some of the corpse-detectors mystery series tend to feature. Iris has solid, valid reasons to be where she is, and the murder she discovers is part of a larger state of affairs involving animal trafficking. The story is well told without putting Iris in unreasonable situations, and is laced through with fascinating details about the animals under her care without beating the reader over the head with a stick labeled "Zoo Mystery!" I loved it, and look forward to more.