When Lucy, a pregnant giant anteater from Belize, is blamed for killing the man found dead in her pen, California zookeeper Teddy Bentley races against time to find the real culprit before Lucy is shipped to another zoo, but her investigation is undermined by another murder, a threatened eviction, a father on the lam, and a socialite mother out to destroy her romance with Sheriff Joe Rejas.

Zookeeper Teddy Bentley takes Alejandro, the Gunn Zoo llama, to a Monterey Bay-area Renaissance Faire. When she discovers the body of the Reverend Victor Emerson, owner of the local wedding chapel, dressed in his royal robes as Henry the Eighth, it appears as if Aljandro stomped the man to death, but a closer look reveals a crossbow dart in the man's back. And the "reverend" is really an escaped convict, and every marriage he's performed in the past...

While taking the yearly "otter count" at a marsh near Gunn Landing Harbor, California, zookeeper Theodora Bentley sees Maureen, her favorite otter, swimming around clutching someone's expensive smartphone. When Teddy rescues the device, she discovers a photograph of a murder-in-progress. A hasty search soon turns up the still-warm body of Stuart Booth, PhD, a local Marine Biology instructor. Booth was a notorious sexual harasser of young female students,...