What kind of maniac would massacre a zoo? Every animal in Yat’s children’s zoo has been killed with a machete and a crowbar. Not even the toothless old dog which sat beside the wishing chair has been spared. The act is cruel and unfathomable. More shocking than any ordinary murder. The only clue is a strange, tawny feather, accidentally discarded at the scene of the crime. In one of the darkest and finest in the series, Detective Harry Feiffer hunts an unlikely killer in a case that makes him question the distinction between man and beast. Meanwhile Christopher O’Yee is forced to consider the possibility that Yellowthread Street Station is haunted, and Spencer and Auden provide their unmissable comic relief as they attempt to apprehend a bank-robbing Sherpa. The twelfth book in William Marshall’s classic series mixes thrills and horror with profound questions and his trademark surreal sense of humour. Praise for the Yellowthread Street series: “Marshall has the rare gift of juggling scary suspense and wild humor and making them both work.” Washington Post Book World “Marshall’s style – blending the hilarious, the surreal, and the poignant – remains inimitable and not easily resisted.” San Francisco Chronicle “Marshall has few peers as an author who melds the wildest comedy and tragedy in narratives of nonstop action.” Publishers Weekly “Marshall is building a growing, iconoclastic body of work that mixes weird fantasy [and] wayward characterization . . . to produce a subtle, charged, atmospheric, lush fiction hybrid sure to satisfy those with a taste for mysteries on the far edges.” Philadelphia Inquirer “Despite the wild humor, Marshall’s stories contain excellent police procedure, real suspense, and fine irony . . . incessantly scary.” Chicago Tribune “Among the best police procedural series on the market.” Detroit Free Press “As an inspired poet of the bizarre, [Marshall] orchestrates underlying insanity into an apocalyptic vision of the future.” New York Times Book Review “Marshall’s novels feature seemingly supernatural events that turn out to have logical, if not precisely rational, origins. He has savage fun with police procedure.” TIME “Nobody rivals Marshall’s ability to expose the links between comic hysteria and the most mundane human foibles, from greed to cowardice to simple funk.” Kirkus Reviews “Moves at the speed of a bullet; don’t read it aloud or you’ll run out of breath.” Chicago Sun-Times