Chain Thinking: A Shep Harrington Smalltown Mystery

By: Elliott Light

Narrated by: Dallas Escue

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 - a mega-medical conglomerate led by the hard-driving Howard Doring, who “apparently believes that the human animal has every right to exploit all living things”. At DMI, she and other chimps were used to test a new anti-obesity pill. The murdered victim, killed by a blow to the head, is Dr. Celia Stone, the DMI researcher in charge of Kikora.

Soon Shep realizes that Kikora, left in his initially unwilling care, is not only stolen property, but the longer he keeps her, the more threatened his own freedom becomes - and the more often tough questions race through his head. What makes an animal property? What is the source of “human” rights? What about an animal whose only difference from humans is 1.6 percent of DNA, that can empathize and suffer like humans? The questions confuse Shep, who’s never had to think hard about them before.

And the only answers he seems to find lie in the big brown eyes of a chimp called Kikora.

Chain Thinking is a whodunit with a heart and a mystery with a message. Once the mystery is solved, there’s a whole lot more left to think about. Shep finds his answers. Will you find yours?

©2009 Elliott D. Light (P)2020 Bancroft Press