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Elliott
Light and The Shep Harrington
SmallTown™ Mystery Series
Chain Thinking
 Syndey
Vail, once a beautiful soap opera star, now has a passion for
championing the rights of animals but she keeps the controversial
methods of her cause as shrouded as she keeps her partially
disfigured face. Sydney enters lawyer-cum-detective Shep Harrington's
life in a cloud of dust and vanishes just as quickly, leaving
behind two very different but strangely connected things: a
chimpanzee and a murder. The chimpanzee is the
young Kikora, whom Sydney liberated from her confining cage
in a testing lab at DMI a mega-medical conglomerate led by
the hard-driving Howard Doring, who apparently believes that
the human animal has every right to exploit all living things.
At DMI, she and other chimps were used to test a new antiobesity
pill. The murdered victim, killed by a blow to the head, is
Dr. Celia Stone, the DMI researcher in charge of Kikora.
Soon Shep realizes that Kikora, left in his initially unwilling
care, is not only stolen property, but the longer he keeps
her, the more threatened his own freedom becomes and the more
often tough questions race through his head. What makes an
animal property? What is the source of human rights? What
about an animal whose only difference from humans is 1.6%
of DNA, that can empathize and suffer like humans? The questions
confuse Shep, who's never had to think hard about them before.
And the only answers he seems to find lie in the big brown
eyes of a chimp called Kikora.
Chain Thinking is a whodunit with a heart and a mystery
with a message. Once the mystery is solved, there's a whole
lot more left to think about. Shep finds his answers. Will
you find yours?
Lonesome Song
Reilly Heartwood, a famous country singer, is dead. His sister
doesn’t recognize the body. The local reverend has refused
to bury him.
Reilly's death is ruled a suicide. And no one has bothered
to investigate. What the hell is going on? That's what Shep,
a 32-year-old divorced and disbarred lawyer, wants to know.
The deeper he probes, the more he's drawn into reconstructing
the final destructive minutes of Reilly's life, the more he's
compelled to confront his own past, and to ultimately learn
the startling truth about his mother, Reilly, and himself.
About Elliott Light
 Elliott
Light grew up outside Washington, D.C. in McLean, Virginia before
the beltway encircled the capital city, before farms were turned
into housing developments, and before open fields became mega-malls.
The small town of Lyle is his literary creation and reflects
a mixture of true life and fiction drawn from the place he grew
up and the places his relatives and ancestors lived.
Light attended the University of Virginia, receiving degrees
in Electrical Engineering and Law. After stints as an environmental
and high tech lawyer, he's now practicing as a patent attorney.
Light resides in Rockville, Maryland with his wife, Sonya,
and their two felines, Sumo and Sasha.
Chain Thinking is his second published novel and the second
in his Shep Harrington SmallTown™ Mystery series. His
first, Lonesome Song, was released in 2002.
The
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