Excerpted from THE BIRDWATCHER by Jacquelyn Mitchard:
I still believed that Felicity would talk to me. She had to.
After the arraignment, though, I had to admit that the odds weren’t great. One thing I knew was true. When Felicity said no, she said it only once.
At the very least, I would be able to tell my editor that I had used every key to try every lock in every door. There’s no limit to the number of times you can try the same key in a different lock until that key opens something, even though tenacity and ingenuity are two different things, and I had plenty of the former and not much of the latter. My dad told me once that the number of permutations with the digits one through ten was more than three million and I still don’t know what he was talking about. More usefully, my mom used to say that the answer to any question was in the question; the key was finding the right question.
I tried calling Felicity at the jail. Whoever answered told me to hold on, and then, after a minute or so, returned to say that Miss Wild was unavailable. Like she was in a meeting? Or on another call?
I wrote six letters to Felicity, each one different from the one before it.
The first was just a greeting to inquire about her condition in there. Did she need blankets? Was I allowed to send her a better pillow? Felicity was strong and athletic but fragile, one of those people who got strep every year but was so stoic she always waited until she was almost too sick to go anywhere but the ER. I had to believe she was suffering. Dane County jail might not be Alcatraz, but it stifled my breath even to imagine myself locked in a room that was maybe eighty square feet, the size of an average bathroom, with the only window high above my sight line and crosshatched with steel wires embedded in the glass. She had never been a good sleeper: I couldn’t count the number of sleepover nights I’d awakened to find her reading or just looking at me in the darkness, her amber eyes like strange lanterns.
The next letter was about the case. That one came back to me inside a larger envelope from Damiano, Chen, and Damiano, Attorneys at Law.
So I wrote again, this time drawing little scenes of some of our old memories, which I thought might give her some comfort. There was the time Felicity agreed to babysit for a squirrel monkey, the pet of the people at her church. Almost all animals were helpless with love for Felicity, but this one, which was named Bushman for some famous gorilla, was the exception. The cage was the size of a Volkswagen and once we got it into the house and pulled off the towels wrapped around it, the creepy little creature peed all over Felicity. Within an hour, we learned that Bushman could pick the lock on his cage too. Of course, he escaped, then proceeded to bite Ruth, then climbed into the pantry to rip apart bags of dried beans and boxes of cereal—I never saw anything without wheels or wings that could move that fast.
Excerpted from THE BIRDWATCHER by Jacquelyn Mitchard, Copyright © 2025 by Jacquelyn Mitchard. Published by MIRA Books
A Zibby's Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2025!
From New York Times bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard comes a page-turning drama that explores the beauty of female friendship; the relationship between money, power, and sex; and the very human desire to protect the ones we love most.
When she is convicted of a double murder, Felicity Wild, a brilliant grad student turned high-priced escort, declares, “I may not be innocent, but I’m innocent of this.”
Reenie Bigelow never doubted it. A jury may have given Felicity a life sentence, but Reenie knows that her childhood best friend is not capable of murder. And so Reenie, a journalist, decides to use her deep connections to Felicity’s past to unravel the truth.
The more she uncovers, the more Reenie is convinced that the story the prosecution told is wrong, despite the puzzling fact that Felicity said not one single word in her own defense. But there's one thing Reenie knows for certain: Felicity would never lie.
Science Fiction | Mystery | Thriller Crime [ Mira Books, On Sale: December 9, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book / audiobook, ISBN: 9780778368670 / eISBN: 9780369761286 ]
Jacquelyn Mitchard's syndicated column, "The Rest of Us," has been featured in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel for more than a decade. She is also the author of The Most Wanted, two books of nonfiction, and The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship, a collection of her columns. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
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