The Protector by Tony Park
One author, perhaps more than any other, is synonymous with adventure. And that author is, of course, Tony Park. But adventure is not all that Park’s about: each of his new thrillers can be depended on to masterfully explore the natural world of Southern Africa, and to centre on the conservation issues that most resonate with South Africans, and with lovers of nature everywhere… while delivering the thrills in absolute spades. And that’s exactly why we have chosen his newest release, The Protector, to be our book of the month. And this one has pangolins and poachers aplenty.
Tony Park’s first novel, Far Horizon, was about elephant poaching. Now he writes about a far smaller animal. The issue remains just as big, however. The pangolin is the most illegally poached and trafficked animal on the planet, and several of its species have been driven to the brink of extinction as a result. Over one million individual pangolins have been stolen from the wild in the past decade, and trading in endangered animals remains one of the largest organised crimes in the world.
The Protector
Professor Denise “Doc” Rado, South Africa’s foremost authority on pangolins, has made her career and her reputation tackling poachers head-on and freeing the imperilled scaly creatures during carefully executed operations. She has even gone undercover, and risked everything to safeguard the critically endangered pangolin. But her life and career are all but destroyed when an especially precarious operation goes terribly wrong.
Now, Doc finds herself obliged to take the lead in a Southern African safari designed to delight and court the generosity of a group of donors to her cause. It is a mixed group, and she will have her work cutout trying to entertain and charm the various personalities of the excursion. It’s not long, however, before her role jumps from host to protector. As the group ventures farther into the African wilds, Doc realises that they are being followed. Doc has made many enemies; could it be that the poachers she has thwarted have come to take their revenge? Or could it be that some other predator is out there, watching, following, hunting them?
Doc will do whatever she must to protect the members of her group – especially the one to whom she has become closest – but she can’t do that properly until she knows just what she is up against.
The Protector, by serving up an electrifying cocktail of rescue, revenge and redemption, proves that even when the animal at the centre of his adventure is small, Park’s thrills are just as big as they ever were.