Alex Carter returns for the fifth book in this exciting wildlife crime series. In a complete change, the setting is the Big Island of Hawaii, where we find a STORM WARNING. The intrepid researcher is caring for hawksbill turtles, which nest on quiet beaches in Hawaii. You guessed it, between poachers and hurricanes, life is about to get lively. And that’s not all to expect.

We start with a chapter in Alaska, where gold miners uncover a frozen mammoth. I hate following a character that’s just set up to be killed, but unfortunately, that’s the case, so don’t get too involved. The bad guys appear for mysterious purposes. But the large mammoth has already been shipped to the museum of palaeontology in the town of Anuenue, Hawaii, which has the means to preserve the find. The bad guys then pursue the carcass.

Alex – I nearly wrote Anna, as a portion is similar to an Anna Pigeon book by Nevada Barr – prepares for a hurricane while checking the turtle eggs and recruiting helpers. She finds a mother turtle tangled in an illegal net, due to a tracker, and hopes she can reach it in time to release it. Little does she know that both the hurricane and a team of amoral killers are homing in on her location near the museum.

We see the evil of animal smugglers and a clear warning that so few turtles remain, and with such long maturation times, that there may not be enough left to reproduce the population. Every turtle protected to lay eggs, every hatchling helped to reach the sea, counts. At the end of the book, the author Alice Henderson provides notes on how to help sea turtles.

Meanwhile, what of Alex, her wilderness knowledge, and her favourite multitool? She’s leading us on a terrifying chase through a storm surge, wild seas, thrashing trees and pitch-black lava tubes, across fiery volcanic lava fields and down into the depths of drains. There are more local people in this tale, more constructed sites, but due to the weather, she ends up alone, running from the bad guys anyway. Yes, Alex is back on form, and it’s so intense, so scary and unpredictable, that it’s hard to read in one sitting. If you loved the earlier stories in the series, you will certainly want to pick up this one. STORM WARNING is a message to us all to expect more hurricanes in our near future, more evil done in pursuit of big money, and more that we value lost.