NIGHT KILL

A zookeeper must discover the identity of a murderer before she becomes a lion’s lunch.

Iris Oakley and Rick Douglas, her husband, have been going through a bad patch. The night they reconcile, Rick’s found dead in the zoo’s lion exhibit. Iris is both grief-stricken and angry that Rick had apparently been dead drunk the same night he’d promised her that he’d quit drinking. She insists that she can keep doing her job with the big cats, but after she narrowly escapes death at the claws of a tiger, her boss moves her to the bird department. The more she thinks about her brush with the tiger, the more convinced she becomes that someone purposely opened the door that let the tiger in with her. Everyone at the zoo thinks that Iris is in shock over Rick’s death, but she’s determined to find out what knowledge might have caused someone to murder him. Although Iris’s former boyfriend Denny, with whom Rick had been staying, suspects that Iris may have murdered her husband for his insurance, they settle their differences and team up to discover the reason for Rick’s murder, barely escaping the crafty killer’s determined attempts to add them to the list.

Mystery mavens may pick out the killer early on, but a wealth of behind-the-scenes detail smoothly integrated into the puzzle makes this a promising debut.