The Extinction Club
A Neo-Noir Thriller
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Nile Nightingale is on the run. Fleeing across the border to rural Quebec, he seeks refuge at an abandoned church when his junked-up, overstimulated mind takes in that he has just witnessed a body drop—in a bloody sack tied with Christmas ribbon. The contents, unconscious but still alive, turn out to be fifteen-year-old Céleste Jonquères, who has been beaten and slashed, like wild game, to slowly bleed out. From his hideout, as he nurses his patient back from the brink and begins to face his own life, he pieces together what he has stumbled into. Animal rights activists, Céleste and her beloved grandmother have taken on a vicious poaching ring, operating from Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains and dealing in bear and other animal parts for the international market, with the collusion of corrupt rangers and police. Her grandmother has died suspiciously. And now that Nile has saved Céleste from the dead, the poachers and their accomplices in this small town have taken notice and are cautiously, but inexorably, closing in. Featuring two brilliant misfits as unlikely sleuths and by turns comic and darkly tragic, this haunting thriller is a neo-noir tour de force, abounding in puzzles and mysteries from a missing cat to the fate of the Eastern cougar.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this gruesome, quirky tale of animal cruelty from Arthur Ellis Award finalist Moore (Red-Rose Chain), Nile Nightingale flees New Jersey where he's facing trumped-up charges for allegedly kidnapping his own daughter for rural Quebec, where he discovers a 14-year-old girl, C leste Jonqu res, tied up in a sack and cut so that she will bleed to death. In nursing her to health, Nile learns the motive of this terrible crime. C leste, along with her recently deceased grandmother, battled against a network of poachers and even helped to send Alcide Bazinet, a terrible animal torturer, to prison. Despite his failures as a father, Nile takes it on himself to protect C leste, a decision that leads him into conflict with the backwoods world of hunters, corrupt wildlife officers, and Bazinet loyalists out for revenge. Stock villains including the sadistic Alcide tend to cheapen the story, but the narrative is held together by the strange yet tender relationship that develops between C leste and Nile.