Claws - by Ozzie Cheek (Paperback)

About the Book

When lions and tigers escape in rural Idaho, town officials, in need of revenue, hold the first lion hunt in America. What nobody counts on are two giant, artifically bred ligers also freed. Hunters flock to town, but unlike deer or elk, ligers do not run from hunters. As more people are killed, it's up to police chief, Jackson Hobbs, and a female, professional hunting guide from Africa, Katy Osborne, to stop the monster cats.

Book Synopsis

Enter the deadly safari and hunt down a blood-thirsty killer!

When twenty-three lions, tigers, and ligers--a giant hybrid cat--appear in rural Idaho, town officials decide to hold the first safari in America. Only police chief Jackson Hobbs, a man haunted by loss and tragedy, and Katy Osborne, a talented hunting guide, seem to realize the potential danger of this situation. With the town desperate for money, the mayor, who also happens to be Jackson's ex-wife, and her boyfriend are adamant that the Idaho Lion Hunt go forward even after people are killed.

As the death toll rises and his own family is put at risk, Jackson must cope with a town doubled in population, the activity of a local antigovernment militia, a willful teenage daughter, an animal rescue group, a missing young boy, a dead state trooper, and Katy's desire to save a rare liger named Kali. Betrayal blossoms alongside romance as Jackson gets closer and closer to discovering the identity of those who engineered this predator panic.

Review Quotes

"Intensely atmospheric, Ozzie Cheek's Claws employs clarity and precision to reveal a rich panorama of a small town entrapped by a big time disaster." --Keith Abbott, author of Downstream from Trout Fishing in America: A Memoir of Richard Brautigan

"Claws is a tremendous read. Well-written and scary. A lethal combination. I suggest you do what I did, and read it in the daytime. Nighttime reading was too scary." --Nancy De Los Santos

About the Author

Ozzie Cheek wrote his first story when he was in the fifth grade. He knew then that he would be a writer, but his life took detours, and he was in his midthirties before he started to write full time. Prior to this period, Cheek attended a Methodist seminary to study for the clergy, taught high school English, lived in a commune in New Mexico, heeded the generational call of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, and somehow still earned a master's degree in communication and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing.

Cheek moved to Los Angeles in the 1990s and found work as a staff writer on a TV series. He wrote movies for HBO, Showtime, NBC, CBS, and Fox, and wrote and produced the TV movie Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.

Cheek's fiction includes the thriller Claws and the literary novel White Boy Blues, and he is the coauthor of Why Planes Crash (2011), the memoir of an aviation disaster investigator.

An avid traveler, Cheek follows baseball and basketball, has been a Shambhala Buddhist meditation practitioner for years, and reads constantly and widely. He divides his time between coastal Maine and Los Angeles.