A Murder at the Human Zoo by Ron Ebest

Description

It is 1904, and the St. Louis World’s Fair 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 leads to a deranged family, to bizarre quasi-scientific experiments, to a terrifying disease of unknown origin—and to the Negrito tribesmen.

These two threads merge in A MURDER IN THE HUMAN ZOO, a story of murder and madness at the dawn of the modern scientific age.