Endangered

April 9, 2012
An animal rescue mission kick starts Littlewood’s engaging third “zoo-dunit” starring spunky Vancouver, Wash., zookeeper Iris Oakley (after 2010’s Did Not Survive). At the behest of Iris’s boss at the Finley Memorial Zoo, Iris and co-worker Denny Stellar head to a desolate meth lab/pot farm recently busted by the DEA, where they find dozens of poorly cared-for exotic birds and endangered tortoises, what looks to be the inventory for a wildlife smuggling operation. Then Iris makes a truly shocking discovery: a murdered teenage girl. Though many single parents with full-time jobs would be happy to let the authorities hunt those responsible, Iris isn’t one of them—and her snooping quickly puts both her and her toddler son in jeopardy. Iris’s attempts to find romance lend some human interest, but Littlewood, herself a onetime zookeeper, remains most compelling when focusing on creatures of the furred and feathered variety.

June 15, 2012
Life behind those zoo cages is every bit as tense as life inside. Zookeepers Iris Oakley and Denny Stellar are called out to a remote drug bust to rescue some exotic animals. When they arrive, they find not the pets they expected but many ailing smuggled parrots and tortoises, apparently another moneymaking scheme for the violently anti-government Tiptons. Although they raised and sold marijuana for years, the Tiptons have recently branched out to cooking meth, and it's a struggle for Iris and Danny to decontaminate the tortoises before taking them to the zoo. At the site, they discover the body of the Tiptons' adopted teen daughter, a former prostitute chosen to marry one of the Tipton sons. As they leave, they're ambushed by Father Tipton and the sons, Jeff and Tom, who want their birds back. Despite Iris' best attempts at CPR, the old man has a heart attack and dies. When Jeff and Tom break into her house asking about their father's last words, Iris and her son flee to her parents for safety. Denny, who had once dated Iris, recently dumped her best friend, Marcie, whose difficulty handling the breakup adds more stress to Iris' life. Things get still worse when Denny is shot, forcing Iris to do more sleuthing on her own. Though she finds them both attractive, Iris even suspects the kindly dog warden and the charming reporter she met at the crime scene. Evidently someone who's noticed that Father Tipton was bailed out of jail with some gold coins is on the trail of the whole cache. Former zookeeper Littlewood, who certainly knows her animals, adds an informative picture of life behind the scenes at the zoo to Iris and Denny's third case (Did Not Survive, 2010, etc.).

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May 1, 2012
When zookeeper Iris Oakley gets a call for assistance at a drug bust, she thinks she will be picking up abandoned pets. Instead, she is surprised to find smuggled macaws and tortoises meant for sale to collectors in the middle of a pot farm and meth lab. She also discovers the body of a woman who escaped from the drug bust but did not live to tell the tale. The cops are only interested in the drugs and the murder, but Iris is determined to uncover the animal-smuggling operation, which quickly puts her in danger. When the brothers of busted family members invade her home looking for information that they think Iris has, she takes her son and flees, but she soon realizes that she will have to take the offensive. Readers will enjoy this fast-moving story that deals with timely environmental issues.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)