Random House
Featuring: Julia Lanchester; Michael Sedwick
261 pages ISBN: 1101883383 EAN: 9781101883389 Kindle: B00N6PEWTQ Paperback / e-Book Add to Wish List
First in the lovely Birds of a Feather Mystery series
comes a crime story set in Suffolk, not far from London.
I've already enjoyed a Potting Shed mystery by Seattle
author Marty Wingate who well describes the English
countryside. Why stop at gardening when you can birdwatch!
THE RHYME OF THE MAGPIE follows Julia Lanchester, a
practical, detail-oriented nature lover who is determinedly
making a new life for herself. Her father remarried soon
after her mother's death, and while it's easy for outsiders
to say life is short and he deserves to be happy, Julia
sees it as a betrayal of the family. Her father hosts a BBC
TV nature show and Julia has cut her ties with the BBC and
come to manage a country estate towards a tourist income.
Lord Fotheringill here is a bachelor, and Julia manages to
thwart a co-worker's attempts to set her up with the peer -
even if they both enjoy birdwatching.
Julia's father comes to see her, then is reported missing
by his new wife, while Julia's car has been stolen.
Together with her father's new assistant, Michael Sedgwick,
she goes to look for him and instead discovers the body of
a man in a gruesome incident. What is going on? Issues of
the day include proposed wind farms that would spoil a rare
bird habitat, and the deceased worked for the wind farm
company. That's not worth killing for, is it? And Julia
still doesn't know where her father Rupert has gone.
With plenty to puzzle us, and lovely countryside details,
we can settle in to enjoy this story. Locally kept farm
pigs not only produce quality pork, they provide bird
habitat. A twitcher - fanatical spotter of rare birds -
makes an appearance, while the one bird that Julia didn't
want to see - a lone magpie, presaging sorrow - signposts
death. A nicely balancing touch is that an Asian family
run a general store, and one of the family offers to help
guide visitors to the stately home where Julia works. In
fact, the cast is plentiful and varied, with modernisation
and tradition side by side in the villages.
Marty Wingate has written non-fiction books on gardening,
which make her fiction books a delight to read. Whether you
love the outdoors, or wildlife, or environmental issues, or
cracking good mysteries, I highly recommend THE RHYME OF
THE MAGPIE.
With her personal life in disarray, Julia Lanchester feels
she has no option but to quit her job on her father’s hit
BBC Two nature show, A Bird in the Hand. Accepting a
tourist management position in Smeaton-under-Lyme, a
quaint village in the English countryside, Julia throws
herself into her new life, delighting sightseers (and a
local member of the gentry) with tales of ancient Romans
and pillaging Vikings.
But the past is front and center when her father, Rupert,
tracks her down in a moment of desperation. Julia refuses
to hear him out; his quick remarriage after her mother’s
death was one of the reasons Julia flew the coop. But
later she gets a distressed call from her new stepmum:
Rupert has gone missing. Julia decides to investigate—she
owes him that much, at least—and her father’s new
assistant, the infuriatingly dapper Michael Sedgwick,
offers to help. Little does the unlikely pair realize that
awaiting them is a tightly woven nest of lies and murder.
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