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The Last Cub deals with a very unpleasant subject: the forcible enslavement of innocent children, mostly immigrant children.
It is set in the mid-1980’s, mostly on
the Lost Coast of Northern California. This
place is just south of the westernmost point
in the 48 contiguous states, Cape Mendocino,
and is reachable almost exclusively by a
two-lane highway that runs along the coast,
south from Cape Mendocino, to the little town
of Petrolia.
The true heroine of the novel is Irene
Linssen, daughter of a single mother. Irene
is immensely gifted, especially with artistic
ability. She is also physically beautiful.
Her mother, Mary, is, at the time of the
novel, not so long recovered from breast
cancer and her divorce from Irene’s
father.
Irene has a special friend, a mountain lion
that she first met as a young child. The
lioness was wandering in pain and grief in
the hills that rise almost from the shore of
the Lost Coast; she had just lost her only
cub. The lioness becomes convinced that Irene
is her missing cub. The bond remains strong
at the time of the novel.
The excerpts given
here introduce Irene and Mother, the lioness,
and describe a sinister plot to prevent law
enforcement (in the person of a
Sheriff’s detective, Dan Colucci) from
discovering the establishment hidden in the
hills north of Petrolia, an establishment
that trains little girls to be sex slaves.
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