WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT FOR - Beka Cooper: A Tortall Legend?

The Beka Cooper Trilogy is the story of Rebakah Cooper, a young Tortallan woman (she is 16 when the trilogy begins) born two centuries before Alanna, Daine, Kel, and Aly.  Beka has dreamed of being a Provost’s Guard—a policewoman—half of her life.  She was born in the capital’s worst slum, the Cesspool, and lived there for eight years, the oldest child of an herbalist with terrible taste in men.  The last one is a criminal, a member of a gang that is terrorizing the wealthy citizens of Corus.  When he beats and robs Beka’s mother and abandons her, the 8-year-old sees her chance for revenge.  She tracks the man to his gang’s hiding place, then reports it to the Lord Provost himself, Gershom of Haryse.  She doesn’t know it, but Gershom’s career as Lord Provost was hanging by a thread as a result of his inability to capture this gang.  With his career restored, Gershom repays his debt to the young slum girl by taking her entire family into his household to be educated and reared to work in a higher income bracket than they would ever have achieved in the Cesspool.  In Beka he has found someone who loves the work of the Provost’s Guard as much as he does.  She becomes his particular protégée, running his errands, hearing his stories, running messages between the different Guard stations, or “Kennels,” and getting his sponsorship into the school for Guards, or as they’re known on the streets, “Dogs.”

Beka Cooper: TERRIERThe first book, TERRIER (Random House hardcover, October, 2006; paperback Fall 2007), is the story of Beka’s first  year on active duty, where she is a “Puppy,” a trainee.  She has been assigned to a pair of senior Dogs, Mattes Tunstall and Clary Goodwin, two of the best in the Lower City Kennel District.  Tunstall is a former hillman, easygoing and funny until he is swept up by combat fever.  Goodwin is small, tough, and mean, a hard woman who makes it very plain from the start that she never asked for a Puppy, she does not want a Puppy, and she will not look after a Puppy.  She and Tunstall have not had a Puppy to train in their long years as partners, and they find it as much a learning experience as Beka does.  The three partners soon find they can learn a great deal from each other.  For one thing, Beka has a very unusual feline companion, the purple-eyed cat named Pounce.  When he feels like it, Pounce can speak and make himself understood by human beings.  He also is far more intelligent than the ordinary cat.  Beka has had four years to get used to this, but Goodwin and Tunstall need to adjust.  Beka can also hear the voices of the restless ghosts who ride the backs of the city’s pigeons, and hear the conversations picked up by the city’s permanent dust spinners, or whirlwinds.  It is these messengers who help Beka to learn that someone is hiring work crews to dig in Lower City cellars—and then murdering the entire crews when the job is done, only to go on and hire new crews.  These informants also help Beka to discover that someone is kidnapping the children of the poor for the single precious item their families own.  That person returns the child when the parents pay up.  When they don’t, the child vanishes, or dies.  Now Beka has to persuade her partners that she knows what she’s talking about, and that the lives of the desperately poor are worth the efforts of the finest of the Provost’s Dogs. (Click here to read a sample from TERRIER)

To listen to a clip from the Random House Audiobook for TERRIER, click on the link below:
 

In BLOODHOUND (Random House hardcover, mid-April, 2009; paperback Fall 2010), Beka is now an official Dog, one who is having trouble keeping a partner.  After a summer of iffy weather, the harvest is not as good as the city’s poor hope.  Worse, Beka’s friend Tansy brings word to her friends that false silver coins, called “coles,” are appearing in the city’s markets.  When Beka and the Dogs of Jane Street Kennel investigate, they learn that the coles appear to be distributed through gambling, and that they are coming from the hands of gamblers who have arrived in Corus from Port Caynn.  Lord Gershom organizes a big, but secret hunt.  A country’s economy hangs on its silver.  If word gets out that there are fake silver coins in the money stream, prices will skyrocket.  Already bread prices have skyrocketed, sparking a riot in the city’s Nightmarket. 

Gershom sends Beka and Goodwin to Port Caynn to investigate where these coles, and the silver that goes into them, are coming from.  The counterfeiters could be anyone, including friends and even lovers.

In MASTIFF (Random House hardcover, Fall 2010; paperback Fall 2011), Beka and her friends will face their greatest and most important challenge ever when the young heir to the kingdom vanishes.  They will be sent out of Corus on a trail that appears and disappears, following a twisting road throughout Tortall.  It will be her greatest Hunt—if she can survive the very powerful people who do not want her to succeed in her goal.

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