Twelve-year-old Teddy Fitzroy is narrating his own story about some extraordinary events that took place at billionaire J.J. McCracken’s famous zoo/amusement park hybrid known as FunJungle. The mascot of the attraction, a hippopotamus named Henry, has died under questionable circumstances. Teddy essentially lives full-time at FunJungle since his mother, renowned expert on gorillas, is employed there. Teddy’s father is also famous for his work as wildlife photographer and so it is quite natural that Teddy has grown up with overdeveloped sense of empathy toward animals.
For this reason, he decides to sneak into a place where he can furtively observe the autopsy that Henry’s death demands and he learns a horrible secret while doing so. Although the official cause of death is peritonitis, that cause was initiated by the presence of unexplained holes in the hippo’s intestine. The doctor who performs the autopsy informs his immediate superiors at FunJungle, but the decision is made to keep it quiet and not release the information. Teddy has just stumbled a cover-up of the murder of the star attraction of the zoo.
Nobody takes Teddy’s accusations seriously until he and Summer McCracken, the daughter whose childhood desires sparked J.J. into deciding to build FunJungle in the first place, find mysteriously sharpened jacks lying at the bottom of Henry’s pool. After informing the doctor who performed the autopsy that they found the weapon responsible for the intestinal damage to the hippo, takes possession of the jacks and warns Teddy to stop his investigation. Teddy refuses to take this advice even after he barely escapes being killed by a poisonous snake purposely allowed to escape it habitat. Only after he is almost killed again by escaped tiger do Teddy’s parents begin to take him seriously.
Eventually, Teddy and Summer get to the truth but only after a horrific accident during Henry’s public funeral when the hippo literally explodes into small pieces landing on everyone present. FunJungle’s director of operations, Martin del Gato—one of the superiors who forced the cover-up—was running a jewelry smuggling operation which involved hiding the gems inside the internal organs of animals. The park’s doctor was blackmailed into removing the gems in order to maintain a secret threatening his job: that his own daughter was a member of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a militant animal rights group constantly bringing negative attention to the park. Henry wound up becoming an accidental victim of this conspiracy after an argument resulted in a bag of jewels being thrown into his pool and then eaten.
