Sacrificed

There’s a secret worth killing for at Island Naturals. A cryptic text brings animal crimes investigator Kieran Yeats to a midnight rendezvous with a client mysteriously named Shrew. Shrew’s late, and when she does arrive, there’s no time for talk. She hastily throws two packages into a nearby garage dumpster, telling Kieran, “Get the things I’ve left for you, and for God’s sake, don’t leave the others behind.” Then her VW screeches out of the parking lot, a big SUV in pursuit. The next morning, Shrew is found dead, victim of a supposed one-car traffic accident.

Shrew’s death, and the packages — which contain a cat in a cloth bag, a phone, and a flash drive — launch Kieran into an investigation of Island Naturals, a respected Vancouver Island cosmetics company, whose reputation rests on the fact that it does not test its products on animals. Or does it? What secret did Shrew discover there? And is the secret, which reaches all the way to China, so huge that someone would kill to hide it? Discovering the answer to these questions could well cost Kieran her life.