A Siege of Bitterns: Birder Murder Mystery 1 - Softcover

Steve Burrows has pursued his birdwatching hobby on five continents. He is a former editor of the Hong Kong Bird Watching Society Magazine and a contributing field editor for Asian Geographic. Steve now lives in Oshawa, Ontario.

In the first book in a projected new series, a Canadian police officer, newly installed as a detective chief inspector in a small British town, gets off to a rocky start when he insists that the murder of a noted activist is connected with bird-watching. His colleagues are skeptical, but DCI Domenic Jejeune, who is (like his creator, Burrows) a longtime bird-watcher, is convinced. Unfortunately, another murder doesn’t make his task any easier. Jejeune is a likable protagonist: the new guy in town, boss to a bunch of cops who don’t know him, with a theory of the crime that he knows is solid, but you’d have to be another bird-watcher to really understand it. Readers who share Jejeune’s (and the author’s) hobby will have a great time with the book. But what about readers unfamiliar with the nuances of birding? Well, they’ll have a great time, too. The author explains everything we need to know—subtly, without great chunks of exposition. This is, finally, a solid, well-constructed murder mystery that happens to involve a subject with which many mystery readers might not be familiar. --David Pitt