A Cast of Falcons: Steve Burrows

A Cast of Falcons is the third book in the Birder Murder Mystery series by Steve Burrows. The author is Canadian and this is the first book I have read for the Canadian Reading Challenge. In this case, the books are set in the UK but the main character is from Canada.

From the description at the Simon & Schuster website:

A man falls to his death from a cliff face in western Scotland. From a distance, another man watches. He approaches the body, tucks a book into the dead man’s pocket, and leaves. 

When the Scottish police show visiting Detective Chief Inspector Domenic Jejeune the book, he recognizes it as a call for help. But he also knows that answering that call could destroy the life he and his girlfriend Lindy have built for themselves in the village of Saltmarsh, in north Norfolk. 

Back in Saltmarsh, the brutal murder of a researcher involved in a local climate change project has everyone looking at the man’s controversial studies as a motive.

My thoughts:

Domenic Jejeune does not even like being a DCI, he would rather be focusing on birdwatching. But he is very good at his job and he had made a name for himself in his previous job in London. In the first book in this series, he was newly appointed to the police department in the small Norfolk town of Saltmarsh, located in the heart of Britain’s premier birding country. In this book, Jejeune is more comfortably settled into his job and his team of detectives, but the return of someone from his past threatens to upset the equilibrium in his work and home life.

I have always enjoyed this series for the bird watching tidbits and the setting. The mystery plots have been secondary for me. However, here the plot is related to climate change and environmental issues and is very well done.

Dominic is introspective or oblivious at times, off in his own world, and this characteristic causes problems in both his work and at home. Sometimes I find that behavior irritating, but it makes him more human too. I also like the secondary characters in this series and how they develop over time. 

This is one of two mystery series that I am reading primarily because of the inclusion of birdwatching and the depictions of the coastal areas where the birds thrive. I would caution however that some reviewers felt that birding was too much of a presence in the plot of this series. The other series that features birdwatching is William Shaw's DS Alexandra Cupidi Series.

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Publisher:   Point Blank, 2018 (orig. pub. 2016)
Length:       384 pages
Format:       Trade paperback
Series:        Birder Murder Mysteries, #3
Setting:       England & Scotland
Genre:        Police procedural
Source:       I purchased this book.

Short Story Wednesday: the Juliet stories by Alice Munro

Recently I read three short stories from Runaway by Alice Munro. All of these stories are about the same woman, Juliet. Together they total about 110 pages, about the length of a novella. 

The first story, "Chance," takes place in 1965, and tells about how Juliet first meets Eric, the man she later moves in with. Juliet had been teaching in a girls school; Eric fishes for prawns and lives in a cabin in Whale Bay, north of Vancouver.   

In the second story, "Soon," set in 1969, Juliet takes her 13-month-old daughter Penelope to visit her parents in the small town she grew up in. Juliet and Eric are still together but have not married, and this embarrasses her parents. Although Juliet's family has never been affiliated with any religion, a minister visits her mother and lectures Juliet about not raising her daughter with any religious beliefs. 

The third story, "Silence,"  takes place about 20 years later. Juliet now has a job interviewing people on television. Eric died years before while he was out fishing during bad weather. Juliet is taking a ferry ride from Buckley Bay to Denman Island, to see Penelope at a spiritual retreat. She has not seen or heard from her daughter for six months. Penelope invited her to the island but when Juliet arrives, she is not there and no one can tell her where to find her. The issue of the lack of spiritual training comes up again in this story.

I liked all of these stories, but I did find Juliet to be an enigma. She seemed to keep her emotions under the surface, and worried a lot about how people viewed her. As is often true, other readers interpreted these stories differently.

I recommend reading these stories all at the same time (or close together). I read the first story, "Chance," two or three weeks earlier than the other stories. While writing this post I went back and reread "Chance" online. I had not remembered that one of the characters, Christa, had featured prominently in the first and last story. Each one of the stories are fine alone, but as a whole they are more meaningful. I am sure I will reread them again later.

"Chance," "Soon" and "Silence" were first published in The New Yorker in 2004.

The three Juliet stories have been made into a movie directed by Pedro Almodovar, titled Julieta. 

A Rip Through Time: Kelley Armstrong

 

This is the first book in a time travel trilogy by Kelley Armstrong. The main character in this book is a female police detective, Mallory Atkinson, from Vancouver, British Columbia, who is visiting Edinburgh in 2019 because her grandmother is very ill.  While out jogging in the evening, she tries to help a young woman in the streets who is being attacked; at that point she is transported to another time, which she later finds out is Edinburgh in 1869. For the rest of the story, Mallory's focus is on trying to figure out what happened and how she can return to her own time. 

Soon she learns that her consciousness is in the body of a very attractive young house maid who works in a house owned by a young doctor, Dr. Gray, and his sister, Isla. This is what she sees when she looks in the mirror:

"The girl—young woman, I should say—is no more than twenty. Honey-blond hair that curls to midback. Bright blue eyes. Average height with curves not quite contained by the corset over my chest. Not me."

There are a lot of convenient coincidences. A policewoman from 2019 transported back to Edinburgh 150 years earlier is very lucky to end up in a situation that she did. The owner of the house she is working in is an undertaker who has gone to medical school, and his major interest is investigating deaths (cause of death, etc.). He has a friend in the police who can give him access to bodies for research in some cases. His sister runs the house; she is a chemist who cannot work in her chosen field because she is a woman. All of this gives her opportunities and access that she would not have had in other households. However, I easily accepted these coincidences because the story was so interesting and fun.

My thoughts:

• Mallory tells the story in first person present tense narration. I usually like stories narrated by the main character and it works well here. I usually don't like the use of present tense in fiction, but I am getting used to it.
• The characters are very well done, and the women in the book are strong characters, not afraid to assert themselves. Mallory has to be careful with her behavior because she knows that no one will believe that she is actually from 150 years in the future. She must act subservient like a maid would, and do all the work a maid does, after she recovers from the attack.
• I like time travel books a lot, and this one was a good read and educational. I learned a lot about Edinburgh and Scotland in 1869. 
• As far as I could tell, the author did a good job with the setting and atmosphere in Edinburgh in 1869. On her website, Armstrong has notes for the sources she used in research for this novel.

Armstrong is a Canadian author, and I am always looking for Canadian authors to read. Since this story is set in Edinburgh, we don't get a Canadian setting, but I have read two books from another one of her series, the Rockton series, set in the Yukon territory in Canada.

I read this book on my Kindle; it was the third eBook I read this year. I have the 2nd book in this series as an eBook also and I would like to read it by the end of the year. 

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Publisher:   Minotaur Books, 2022
Length:       352 pages
Format:      eBook
Series:        A Rip Through Time #1
Setting:      Edinburgh, Scotland
Genre:       Time Travel
Source:      Kindle Unlimited.