After a long summer spent inspecting backcountry toilets, the last thing nature lovers Nathan and Beth Drake want is to clean up somebody else's mess. But when a troubled young hiker on the Pacific Crest Trail tearfully asks them to take her exhausted puppy-a floppy-eared charmer named Penny-microbiologist Nathan can't see the harm. When she begs them not to tell anyone they've seen her, ex-reporter Beth thinks something smells funny. The trailside encounter turns the long-married Drakes' sanitation sabbatical into a rollicking search for Emma Turnstone, the trouble-prone daughter of tech billionaires. Emma, they soon discover, is an animal rights activist with lots of reasons to stay hidden. Not least: the bombing that injured a British biotech CEO-and killed the fetching teen in his company. If she's not behind that, why run? That's what London tabloid reporter Nigel Turner wants to know. Recruited by Emma's wealthy parents as an ad hoc search and rescue team, laconic Nathan and loquacious Beth set out after the girl, whom they were the last to see alive. The search sends the long-married couple and their new companion Penny racing across Washington State--from boomtown Seattle to down-on-its-luck La Likt and finally up into the highest snowy passes of the North Cascades. Along the way, Nathan develops a connection to the quirky young woman who's good at keeping secrets. Beth hears an eerie echo of her own family's tragedy in Emma's story . . . which, by the way, she wants to publish before that twit Nigel does. In LUCKY PENNY, Nathan and Beth take alternating chapters, weaving together the fast-paced tale of the chase and revealing how their own pasts fuel their desire to find Emma before the guys with the guns do. LUCKY PENNY is the first novel by Courter P. Donnelly. When not on the road or the trail, the author divides time between Seattle; Cle Elum, Washington; and Tahoe City, California.
