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Rhino Horn Underground
Deven Greene’s Rhino Horn Underground follows Paige, a struggling San Francisco journalist who travels to South Africa to report on rhino poaching and stumbles into a far more dangerous story than the one she planned to write. After a wildlife-reserve massacre, she is pulled into the orbit of Spencer Crenshaw, a slippery former FBI agent whose work with rhino blood, synthetic horns, and black-market demand keeps shifting from suspicious to visionary to perilous. What begins as an environmental thriller becomes a knotty adventure about conservation, commerce, ambition, and the morally murky question of whether saving animals may require cooperating with the systems that exploit them.
I liked how quickly the novel throws Paige off balance. She is not a polished action hero; she is frightened, opportunistic, judgmental, curious, and sometimes wrong in ways that feel genuinely human. Her suspicions about Spencer give the early chapters a prickly momentum, and the book is at its best when it lets her misread a room, then slowly recalibrate. The South African setting is not merely decorative. The landscape, the wildlife reserves, the poaching economy, and the logistics of conservation all give the story a rough, sun-blasted specificity.
Greene does not present conservation as a clean moral poster. Instead, she builds a thriller around an uncomfortable proposition: maybe the sentimental answer is not always the practical one. The science involving lab-made rhino horn gives the story its most distinctive charge, and the novel’s pace rarely lets the research sit there inertly. Paige’s personal life and the larger trafficking plot create a crowded emotional field, but that clutter also gives the book an authentic quality; everyone seems to have a private agenda, a bruise, or a debt.
This book is for readers who enjoy environmental eco-thrillers, wildlife crime fiction, conservation fiction, suspense, and morally complex adventure. Fans of Michael Crichton’s issue-driven science suspense may recognize the same appetite for turning a controversial idea into a chase, though Greene’s novel is more intimate and more emotionally entangled. Rhino Horn Underground is a bristling, brainy thriller that asks whether doing the right thing still counts when the path to it runs through the shadows.
Pages: 349 | ASIN : B0GWSGKDPT
Convey Emotion
Tracking Ariana follows a legally documented Afghan immigrant mother torn from her family by ICE, and the desperate race by her husband and unlikely allies to uncover the truth behind her disappearance. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
A common question for many authors is “How do you come up with Ideas to write about?” For this book, it was the topic of news reports that had raised my awareness and ire. Witnessing unfairness triggers emotions in most of us, at least it does me. Those emotions were my motivation for Tracking Ariana.
How did you balance portraying political systems with keeping the emotional core grounded in family and character?
Something I’ve had to learn as an author is to convey emotion to my readers. Writing is not just telling a story, it’s giving the readers a reason to become invested in the story. I’m getting better at it, I hope. In the case of Tracking Ariana, the political aspects were just the vehicle to take them there.
Ariana’s internal fear and self-blame feel especially intimate. What guided your approach to writing her interior life?
I think all parents share a love for their children, and it is this love that makes us question our actions when caring for them—to do better. In Ariana’s case, she realized, too late, that by wearing a hijab in the United States, she had endangered her family. Reflecting on that, she uses prayer to regain her footing.
What do you most hope readers carry with them after finishing Tracking Ariana?
I’d hope they find empathy for those having their human rights taken away from them. As Mia said in the book, “You know, we’re all orbiting the sun together on this tiny blue ball. We should be trying to get along, not hating one another.”
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When Ariana Wilkinson—a lawful U.S. resident and Afghan-born wife of an Air Force Colonel—is wrongfully detained by ICE during a religious festival in Westchester County, her disappearance sets off a desperate search that exposes the darkest corners of American immigration enforcement.
Returning home from deployment, Colonel Joseph Wilkinson finds his house empty and his wife and children missing. When he learns that Ariana has been taken into custody, he turns to attorney Seth Bodner for help. Together, they fight to get his children back—but Ariana vanishes before her immigration hearing ever takes place.
Enter Dan Burnett, a seasoned private investigator with NYPD roots. As Dan and Seth track Ariana through a labyrinth of detention centers from New York to Florida, they uncover a covert federal program of deportation—erasing them from the system before anyone can intervene.
Meanwhile, Ariana must survive the terror and uncertainty of detention, clinging to faith, memory, and the love of her family. But as her captors move her closer to deportation, time is running out—and the truth threatens to ignite a national scandal.
Told from multiple perspectives, Tracking Ariana is a gripping legal and investigative thriller about one woman’s fight for freedom and a family’s battle against a corrupt system. Fans of John Grisham, Scott Turow, and Lisa Scottoline will be riveted by this story of courage, justice, and the power of love in a nation divided.
