Primacy

Researcher Liane Vinson thinks she can handle her big promotion to the primate lab at the world’s most secretive animal testing facility. Going along to get along, she’ll ignore both the vitriol of animal rights protestors outside Pentalon’s gates and the cold calculus her bosses use to distance themselves from their subjects.

But then one of her favorite animals, a bonobo she calls Bea, shocks Liane by demonstrating the ability to speak. To rescue Bea from the knife, Liane must shed her complacency and challenge CEO Axel Flickinger, who holds the power of life and death at Pentalon. Will Liane continue to follow the rules, sacrificing individual creatures to the supposedly greater good?

Imperiling her own life and that of her friend, veterinarian Mickey Ferrone, Liane turns renegade, eventually traveling from New York to Kinshasa in an effort to save an ape so unique its very existence endangers an entire industry. Worse still, as Liane learns, this little ape threatens human primacy in nature.