Former NYPD K9 officer Elena thought she'd already lived through the worst night of her life. The one where she lost her partner, and the dog who was more family than colleague, in a single, senseless moment. Grief like that doesn't heal in a city that never stops moving. So she did the only thing that made sense. She left.
She came home, to the country of her birth, chasing something simple. Quiet. Trees. A slower kind of air. A place to finally put the badge down and just breathe.
What she finds instead is a small city built on a secret nobody will say out loud.
The first time she sees the cage, massive, tarped, rolling down the main road in broad daylight, she asks questions. She gets silence. It takes time, and a few uncomfortable truths, before she understands this town survives on money from wildlife traffickers. The poachers aren't outsiders. They're neighbors, officials, maybe even the sheriff sworn to stop them.
With no proof, no backup, and a badge that doesn't mean anything here, Elena finds an unlikely ally in a local bar owner, a man who tried to fight this fight alone once and lost. Together, they start small, freeing captured animals one cage at a time. Then the poachers push back. The bar burns. And Elena realizes that small isn't going to work anymore.
What follows is a fight for a town that isn't sure it wants to be saved, a town that has to choose between the money it knows and a future it's never let itself imagine. Federal agents, a council vote that could go either way, and a wildlife reservation hanging in the balance. Elena isn't just trying to stop traffickers anymore. She's trying to give a dying place a reason to live.
Species' Faces is a story about what's left of a person after loss, and what a community is willing to risk to become something better than what made it money.
This book is being written right now, and early readers help shape it.
Want to be notified the moment it's available? Reserve your copy in advance. No payment now, just a place in line.
Want to help shape the story before it's finished? Apply to become a beta reader and get chapters as they're written, with the chance to give feedback that actually influences the final book.
Speechless Faces
