Mark of the Pride

They killed his family for a buyer's quota. He's been tracking them ever since. When poachers slaughter an entire lion pride in a single brutal night, safari guide Steven Cole finds only one survivor: Kago, the pride's scarred, aging male - and Kago is already gone, moving north with a purpose that looks less like grief and more like a plan. Steven knows exactly where that kind of hunt ends. Five years ago, a single half-second of hesitation cost a fellow ranger his life, and Steven walked away from armed fieldwork rather than risk that failure again. Now, racing against a corrupt leak, a fractured poaching crew, and a lion running on nothing but old scar tissue and fury, he's being pulled back toward the exact choice he swore he'd never face twice. He's not alone. A wildlife veterinarian fighting a losing institutional war. An anti-poaching commander running an unwinnable budget. A coerced teenage poacher whose conscience may cost him everything he has left. All of them converging on a truth the poachers don't know Steven has guessed: the cub they took alive is the only reason Kago hasn't stopped. MARK OF THE PRIDE is a fast-moving, multi-perspective adventure about the thin, costly line between revenge and justice - and what it takes, on both sides of that line, to still be the person you were before the worst week of your life began. For readers of Paul Doiron's Mike Bowditch novels and Lynda Rutledge's WEST WITH GIRAFFES - where the wild and the human collide, and neither one walks away unchanged.