Tiger Trap.

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

This is the fourth tiger-themed book Dundurn has published by master storyteller Eric Walters. Once again, 14-year-old Sarah Fraser and her pesky kid brother, Nicholas, are just trying to keep all their animal friends safe and happy at Tiger Town. Unfortunately, even though their animal sanctuary is already tottering on bankruptcy, Tiger Town’s owners, Mr. McCurdy and Vladimir, just cannot seem to say no to an animal in distress. New hungry mouths are arriving all the time. Financial rescue seems to be at hand when a stranger named Anthony arrives one day and makes a large donation. Although Anthony’s money is welcome, his questions are not. He seems to know an awful lot about how much money dead animals are worth. Alive, a 15-year-old tiger like Tiger Town’s Buddha is just a meat-munching liability, but dead he is worth nearly $100,000 for his skin and organs in the black market trade in exotic animal organs. Just as Sarah hears rumours that there is an armed gang in the neighbourhood looking for a gorilla, the sanctuary is quarantined because of an outbreak of parrot fever.

Eric Walters has been known to show up at book signings and school visits with an actual baby tiger as a co-star. He bases his tiger books on extensive research he has done at an actual animal sanctuary in southern Ontario. For this book, Walters has created a cat’s cradle of diverse threads that cross each other chapter by chapter until the final thread leads the way out on the last page. Every page has a humour gag. Poor Sarah seems to be the only functioning adult on site. Mr. McCurdy and Vladimir need her constant intervention to stay out of jail. Nicholas, her brother, is always giving her guff. She even takes crap, both literally and verbally, from Tiger Town’s resident parrot. While entertaining with everything from puns to poop jokes, Walters manages to enlighten the reader about the multi-billion-dollar trade in exotic animals, which is second only to drugs as the world’s largest underground market. The story ends with a bang and there is no sign that Tiger Town is ready to close anytime soon, so perhaps readers can look forward to another Tiger Town adventure someday. Highly recommended.