New Releases by Jim Murphy

Phoebe, Deirdre, and Mitch, college students working on their primatology and anthropology degrees, set off for Africa to find their father, who has disappeared from a mysterious research station at the edge of an immense forest. After being captured by militant rebels, they begin to travel down different paths to discover things they never imagined existed. In Confessions of a ChimpManZee, parts of Arthur''s brain were transplanted into the skull of a hybrid bonobo. In Africa''s Children, Arthur is sent to Africa to help with a Pentagon project to create an army of killer apes, but instead, he disappears into the jungle. Arthur has left human children behind in California, and those three children, now of college age, and with an inheritance to finance them, travel to Africa to search for their missing father. After they are captured by a band of rebel soldiers, they discover that the compound where their father had been living has been destroyed by those same soldiers. However, it may be that their father has escaped being killed and has gone somewhere even the forest chimps will not visit. The children become separated and fall in with different groups who are headed in the same direction for their own nefarious reasons, and as the groups converge, the children discover things about themselves and about life that they never dreamed possible.

What is Life? Where did it come from? Where is it going? What are the characteristics of advanced lifeforms? What will life be like as it continues to evolve? What does this have to do with God? Centuries ago, people conceptualized the existence of gods based on conjecture and observable phenomena. These early theories of the driving forces behind nature became codified in such a way that it became impossible for them to change with the times. Now new facts apparently assault these old theories. Is it possible, however, that new scientific facts can reveal the true nature of these unseen forces? Can we learn something of God by examining life--by seeing where it has been, where it is going, where we fit, and how we can help?

A man trapped in the body of an ape leads a group of trained killer chimpanzees to carve out a new life in the old world of Africa. Arthur Godschalk, an undergraduate student, innocent in the ways of the world and of women, finds part-time work at a lab that has contracted with the government to do experimental development of an army of killer chimpanzees. Becoming intimately involved with the family that owns the lab, as well as with several other women who work there, Arthur finds himself in a precarious position when he wakes up after an accident to find his fate is totally in the hands of the person who hates him most in the world, his mother-in-law. Leading his new chimp army from California to Africa, Arthur struggles to survive his new situation as he discovers secrets about himself, as well as the search for meaning that has driven all hominids for a million years--the quest of Life itself.