What’s a talking mouse worth? To Jason Ramback she’s the ticket to being somebody: respected, honored, important. To Gavin MacDonald she’s the source of a dilemma: is being human a guarantee you’re superior to every other animal, even a tiny one with thumbs, speech and feelings?
To the security apparatus of the government, she’s a tool, like a smart bomb or an unmanned aircraft.
In Pool of Tears, the first book in the Mustt Adventures series, you met Dorothy Mustt, mouse extraordinaire, and learned of her misguided love for Jason Ramback, a human youth with an anomalous patch of mouse fur on his cheek. Her love led her to violate the talking mice’s Prime Directive, “Never, ever talk to a Human.”
Now meet Gavin MacDonald, mid-list mystery writer, commissioned to make Dorothy’s ungrammatical jottings into readable prose. He learns that Jason, the first human to discover Talkers, has imprisoned Dorothy at Camp Pendleton Marine base, under the aegis of the CIA. Jason hopes to coerce or cajole Dorothy into revealing where her fellow Talkers are hiding. He’s promised the CIA he can assemble a cadre of miniature spies, assassins and stooges to give the US another weapon in it’s effort to maintain world dominance.
Gavin soon regrets taking the job without knowing all the facts. When he learns that Dorothy’s a prisoner and detests her captor, he decides to free her. He wins the trust of Mary Portale, a Marine lance corporal, to help him spirit Dorothy away from the base. Davy, Mary’s younger brother and electronics whiz, modifies a sophisticated digital voice recorder, making it capable of changing a mouse’s high-pitched, rapid-fire squeaks into intelligible speech.
With the help of longtime friend, onetime lover, Charita Read, Gavin and the Portales rescue the mouse, elude the spooks and hide out in Charita’s house. There they debate whether Dorothy should try to make contact with her kin, risking leading Jason and his handlers to their location. Dorothy vows she’ll die first.
The end of the story anticipates the last book of the Mustt Adventures series, wherein Gavin will restore Dorothy’s place of honor among the Talkers of the Lost Colony.
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