Jeffrey Chapman

Strays Jeffrey Chapman

A boy named Jeb finds the half-decomposed carcass of a mysterious animal washed up on a Nantucket beach. Not exactly a dog, not a cat, with the hands of a raccoon, no one's seen anything quite like it before. Until the creatures start turning up, alive and well, in isolated pockets across Massachusetts and upstate New York... adopting some people and slaughtering others.

A tech billionaire forms an alliance with a clandestine government agency to understand their secrets: what are they? Where did they come from? What can they do? To help find out, two young scientists are offered a six-month research assignment, confined to a top-secret lab, for money beyond their dreams. And a bunch of ordinary people are forced to wrestle with the most urgent question of all: friend or foe?

Strays is a fast-paced, science fiction thriller that explores the queasy side of the owner-pet relationship and poses the question: just how secure is our place as top dog on planet Earth?