Syndey Vail, once a beautiful soap opera star, 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. The murder 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% 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.
"Small-town lawyer Shep Harrington should have known nothing good could come of a sudden visit from a stranger. When former soap-opera star Sydney Vail lands on his doorstep all keyed up, Shep figures he should help the damsel in distress, going so far as to agree to baby-sit her companion, a very intelligent chimp named Kikora. Problem is, Sydney doesn't return, and soon Shep learns that she stol
Booklist
"Seamlessly weaves together fiction and a social issue--animal rights."
