The Web – Jonathan Kellerman (Alex Delaware #10) Preloved Paperback

In the fall of 1940, the Nazis are at the height of their power – France is occupied, Britain is enduring the Blitz and is under threat of invasion, America is neutral and Russia is in an uneasy alliance with Germany. Stephen Metcalfe, the younger son of a prominent American family, is a well-known man about town in occupied Paris. He’s also a minor asset in the US’s secret intelligence forces in Europe. Through a wild twist of fate, it falls to Metcalfe to instigate a bold plan that may be the only hope for what remains of the free world. Now he must travel to wartime Moscow to find, and possibly betray, a former lover – a fiery ballerina whose own loyalties are in question – in a delicate dance that could destroy all he loves and honours.

Baghdad falls . . . and armed men are seen looting the city zoo. Amid a hail of bullets, a concealed underground lab is ransacked–and something horrific is set loose upon the world.

Seven years later, Louisiana state veterinarian Lorna Polk investigates an abandoned shipwrecked fishing trawler carrying exotic caged animals, part of a black market smuggling ring. But there is something disturbingly wrong with these beasts–each an unsettling mutation of the natural order, all sharing one uncanny trait: incredibly heightened intelligence.

Joining forces with U.S. Border Patrol Agent Jack Menard–a man who shares with her a dark and bloody past–Lorna sets out to uncover the truth about this strange cargo and the terrorist threat it poses. Because a beast escaped the shipwreck and is running amok–and what is about to be born upon the altar of Eden could threaten not only the future of the world but the very foundation of what it means to be human.