A story of murder and madness at the dawn of the modern scientific age
Set at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, it features a zoo of three thousand human "specimens" gathered from four continents. Among them are the Negrito, Filipino tribesmen that anthropologists call half-human, half-ape "missing links." When a spectator kills a tribesman, defense attorneys raise a harrowing question. Can a person be convicted of murder if science says the victim is not a human being?
Ned McDaniel and Emma Churchill, reporters for a muckraking St. Louis newspaper, stumble upon a series of macabre murders. Their investigation in A Murder in the Human Zoo leads them to a deranged family, to bizarre quasi-scientific experiments, to a terrifying disease of unknown origin--and to the Negrito tribesmen.