Foodchain

Frank Winter has a gift. He can soothe and handle damn near anything on four legs. But his future career as a racetrack equine veterinarian is destroyed with one vicious thoroughbred kick to the head. Now, the men who financed his education want their investment back and Frank becomes the guy who has to get his hands dirty when a horse is worth more dead than alive.

When a job goes bad and a horse dies on national television, Frank is taken to a rundown roadside zoo where the animals aren’t just hungry. They’re slowly starving. And Frank is on the menu.

After finding refuge in an isolated small town ruled with near absolute power by Horace Sturm, Frank sees a chance to make some quick cash. Sturm’s got his own problems, though. There’s a tumor in his head the size of a golf ball and his thirteen-year-old son has brought nothing but shame and embarrassment to the family name.

Under a brutal summer sun, Frank organizes a series of exotic animal hunts through the ranches and back yards of Whitewood, hoping to end the animals’ starvation quickly and painlessly. But he seriously underestimates the madness lurking under the surface of the desperate town. Nor does he truly understand the depth of hatred in the decades-old feud between Sturm and the Glouck family. And he definitely doesn’t anticipate falling for nineteen-year-old Annie Glouck.

While Whitewood rots into a ghost town full of bones, blood, and gunpowder, vicious predators and hunters with itchy trigger fingers stalk the empty streets. It’s survival of the fittest as the hunts escalate into death matches between exotic animals and Frank must decide where he stands on the fine line between predator and prey.