The Last Deer
The hunters came for the deer. Someone came for the hunters.
Tess Calloway has spent twenty years removing invasive animals from places that can't survive them. Badwater Island should be just another job. Two thousand deer are eating the island down to bare dirt, and the last of a rare native tree is dying with them. She has a crack crew, three helicopters, and a contract with the island's oldest family.
The town of Port Erie wants them gone. There are protests on the pier, slashed tires, and a flyer taped in every shop window. Tess expected that. She didn't expect the first body.
A crew member falls from a canyon rim in the dark. That night, an envelope slides under Tess's door. Inside is a thermal photograph of the moment he died, taken from close enough to touch him. In the corner, in neat pencil, is a single number.
Then another member of her crew is gone, and another envelope is waiting.
Every death looks like an accident. Every death comes with a number. And as the town turns on itself, with neighbors accusing neighbors and an innocent schoolteacher arrested in front of her own class, Tess and a young drone pilot who grew up on the island begin to understand that the killer isn't fighting for the deer at all. Someone has a reason to want this job to fail, and they are willing to spend lives to make it happen.
Tess has spent twenty years thinking like the thing being hunted. To stop him, she will have to become prey.
The Last Deer is a tense, emotional island thriller about loyalty, grief, and the price of saving a place you love, and about the quiet, patient people who will kill to own it.
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