Before Shetland and Vera, Ann Cleeves wrote the George and Molly Palmer-Jones series following remarkable mysteries in a birdwatching community—now in print for the first time in the US.
A rare and unrecorded sea bird captures all the birders attention while right under their noses the most fanatical birder of them all disappears . . . only for Greg Franks’ corpse to later be found floating in the sea, the head bludgeoned.
Had it not been for Greg, amateur detective George Palmer-Jones would not have been on the bird watching trip in Cornwall to the first place. Greg Franks’ anxious parents had hired him to try and persuade their errant son to return home. George would have turned the case down flat but the offer of a free weekend of bird watching was too tempting to resist. Now, he must shoulder the burden of discovering why the young man had been murdered.
Who hated Franks enough to kill him? It seems almost everyone on the trip has a motive and George has his work cut out for him.