Jason Conrad, a man with the wealth of Bill Gates, decides to preserve for posterity the seeds of as many animal and plant species as possible in a vast and remote underground facility, taking the world’s legitimate seed banks and "frozen zoos" to a whole new level. Conrad’s secret doomsday complex, though, is staffed by a combination of environmental experts and mercenaries who will stop at nothing to achieve their once-noble ambitions.

After a fellow police officer is murdered and his award-winning German shepherd disappears, Montreal Sergeant-Detective Irina Drach and her young partner, Sergeant-Detective Hudson, connect the crime with a seed bank raid in Ardingly, England, and the kidnapping of a Triple Crown Thoroughbred named Zarathustra. Soon it becomes apparent that highly organized, ruthless abduction teams are raiding seed banks around the world, as well as scooping up the finest animal specimens from zoos, nature preserves, and the wild. Despite the global implications and ballooning media interest, however, Irina never forgets that her foremost aim is to solve the murder of a friend and fellow officer.

d leonard freeston has travelled extensively - from Beijing and Bora Bora to Budapest and Baja - but his beloved Montreal has always been home. After studying science at McGill University and obtaining Distinction in Honours philosophy from Concordia University, he worked as a rock and jazz critic, a mycologist, a rock drummer, a recording engineer, a merchant seaman, a carnival barker, and a zookeeper. Some years ago he wrote an enthusiastically received play called Birth Rite, using the pseudonym Eliot Carroll. Lately, while his wife runs the tropical plant business he and she founded three decades ago, freeston day-trades on the New York Stock Exchange between bouts of writing.

D. leonard freeston's profile page

• Commended, Dewey Divas and the Dudes

I’m delighted to find that D. Leonard Freeston, of Montreal, has a message, talent and a sense of humour…Freeston makes this plot work with some snappy cop banter, a couple of really good characters and a writing style that harks back to the grand old days of writers like H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. If you, like me, loved Kings Solomon’s Mines and She, you’ll love Irina Drach.

Globe and Mail

I nearly missed out on this very good thriller because it came presold as an "environmental" novel... Im delighted to find that d leonard freeston, of Montreal, has a message, talent and a sense of humour ... you'll love Irina Drach.

The Globe and Mail

The writing is simply superb. The scientific research that has gone into it is mind boggling, yet presented in such a way that even I could understand it. And the action is breathtakinglynonstop as it flits back and forth between continents in true epic thriller fashion.

Your Local Journal, Montreal, QC

I had trouble putting it down ... the writing is clever and funny.

Evolver

The writing is simply superb. The scientific research that has gone into it is mind boggling, yet presented in such a way that even I could understand it. And the action is breathtakingly nonstop as it flits back and forth between continents in true epic thriller fashion.

Your Local Journal

Canadian Freeston's first novel shares many traits with the work of such grand adventure writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard, including ... outsized human figures and animals of heroic proportions, and improbable but entertaining quests.

Publishers Weekly