The first three short paragraphs of this book set the tone of the rest of the story.
There were two reasons why William South did not want to be on the murder team.
The first was that it was October. The migrating birds had begun arriving on the coast.
The second was that, though nobody knew, he was a murderer himself.
William South has worked as a policeman for 20 years but has successfully avoided being on a murder team. For the newest case, he is immediately signed on to work with a new Detective Sergeant, Alexandra Cupidi, since she is unfamiliar with the area and the body was discovered in his neighborhood. He soon finds out that the victim is his next door neighbor, Bob Rayner. They were not close, but had similar interests, including birding, so they spent a lot of time together. So he has a personal reaction to the crime. Rayner was sort of a mystery man, never talked much about himself or his past. His sister was visiting, and was the one who found the body, but after she was interviewed she disappeared.
As the case continues, South gets to know DS Cupidi and her troubled teenage daughter. DS Cupidi is driven and aggressive, the opposite of Shaw. Cupidi's daughter, Zoë, is a good character. She is annoying because she is always trying to irritate her mother, and compensates for her loneliness as the new girl in school with sarcasm and rude humor. South gets roped into taking her birding with him a couple of times and they form a bond.
William South is a good policeman; other than doing his job, he spends most of his time birding. He is a very sympathetic character, much more so than DS Cupidi. Getting back to the fact that South has killed a man, this happened before he was a policeman, and throughout the book there are flashbacks to the time period when that event took place. It is pretty clear who South killed but there are plenty of questions (why and how, for starters) that don't get answered until close to the end of book. So in a sense there are two mysteries.
The story and style of writing kept me engaged. The descriptions of the setting, the coast of Kent near the Dungeness nuclear power station, were very well done. I was very involved in following William South's story and seeing how this case affected him. By the time I had read about 80% of the book, I had no idea how it would be resolved. Perhaps the story did not end exactly as I would have liked, but the disparate threads of the story were pulled together effectively.
This book is followed by the first in the DS Alexandra Cupidi series, where she becomes the main character. I am very curious about that and will be reading that one.
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Publisher: Mulholland Books, 2017 (orig. pub. 2016)
Length: 328 pages
Format: Hardcover
Series: Prequel to the DS Alexandra Cupidi series
Setting: Kent, UK
Genre: Police procedural
Source: I purchased my copy.
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