Beasts of Prey

Koffi is sixteen, working off a family debt by tending wild creatures at the Night Zoo in Lkossa. Generations ago an earthquake called the Rupture split the city and drove magic underground. Lkossa has hunted its wielders since. When the zoo's owner threatens people she loves, a power tears out of Koffi that she cannot explain or control. It is strong enough to wreck part of the compound.

Ekon is seventeen, one trial away from becoming an elite warrior. That trial puts him in the path of the Shetani, a century-old monster that has stalked the Greater Jungle for as long as anyone can remember, and in Koffi's path too. Her power saves his life, and costs him the only future he was ever offered.

With nothing left to go back to, the two strike an uneasy bargain: hunt the Shetani together, and split whatever it buys each of them. The search takes them past the city walls and into the Greater Jungle, a wilderness thick with old magic. Worse things than the beast they came for live there too, and neither tells the other the whole truth about what they actually want.

Beasts of Prey moves fast and stays close to its two leads, pairing a monster hunt with a slower, wary alliance between teenagers who start out lying to each other. Its magic draws on Pan-African mythology, and a light romance runs alongside the survival plot. It is the first book in Ayana Gray's Beasts of Prey trilogy, and it reached the New York Times bestseller list.