"Can you catch the unicorn? You'll have to use your brain. So set your traps and prep your team to pet that rainbow mane!"--

The son of a zookeeper, Pi Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched...

Whenever you hear the sky rumble, that usually means a storm. In Virgil Flowers' case, make that two. The first storm comes from, of all places, the Minnesota Zoo. Two large, and very rare, Amur tigers have vanished from their cage, and authorities are worried sick that they've been stolen for their body parts. Traditional Chinese medicine prizes those parts for home remedies, and people will do extreme things to get what they need. Some of them are...

"Go behind the scenes and discover how scientists at three US zoos are helping wild and captive orangutans, black-footed ferrets, and black rhinoceroses."--

Each car on the train has one more zoo animal than the one before, from the first car with an elephant to the last with ten birds.

An unobservant zookeeper is followed home by all the animals he thinks he has left behind in the zoo.