The Sixth Extinction

Jason Conrad, a man with the wealth of Bill Gates, decides to preserve for posterity the seeds of as many animal and plant species as possible in a vast and remote underground facility, taking the world's legitimate seed banks and "frozen zoos" to a whole new level. Conrad's secret doomsday complex, though, is staffed by a combination of environmental experts and mercenaries who will stop at nothing to achieve their once-noble ambitions. After a fellow police officer is murdered and his award-winning German shepherd disappears, Montreal Sergeant-Detective Irina Drach and her young partner, Sergeant-Detective Hudson, connect the crime with a seed bank raid in Ardingly, England, and the kidnapping of a Triple Crown Thoroughbred named Zarathustra. Soon it becomes apparent that highly organized, ruthless abduction teams are raiding seed banks around the world, as well as scooping up the finest animal specimens from zoos, nature preserves, and the wild. Despite the global implications and ballooning media interest, however, Irina never forgets that her foremost aim is to solve the murder of a friend and fellow officer.

d leonard freeston has travelled extensively -- from Beijing and Bora Bora to Budapest and Baja -- but his beloved Montreal has always been home. After studying science at McGill University and obtaining Distinction in Honours philosophy from Concordia University, he worked as a rock and jazz critic, a mycologist, a rock drummer, a recording engineer, a merchant seaman, a carnival barker, and a zookeeper. Some years ago he wrote an enthusiastically received play called Birth Rite, using the pseudonym Eliot Carroll. Lately, while his wife runs the tropical plant business he and she founded three decades ago, freeston day-trades on the New York Stock Exchange between bouts of writing.