A Bird in the Hand (George & Molly Palmer-Jones #1) by Ann Cleeves Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense
Series: George & Molly Palmer-Jones #1
Pages: 288
Published by Minotaur Books on January 28, 2025 (first published January 1, 1986)
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Before Shetland and Vera, Ann Cleeves wrote the George and Molly Palmer-Jones series following remarkable mysteries in a birdwatching community—now in print for the first time in the US.
In England’s birdwatching paradise, a new breed has been sighted—a murderer . . . Young Tom French is found dead, lying in a marsh on the Norfolk coast, with his head bashed in and his binoculars still around his neck. One of the best birders in England, Tom had put the village of Rushy on the birdwatching map. Everyone liked him. Or did they?
George Palmer-Jones, an elderly birdwatcher who decides quietly to look into the brutal crime, discovers mixed feelings aplenty. Still, he remains baffled by a deed that could have been motivated by thwarted love, pure envy, or something else altogether.
But as he and his fellow ‘twitchers’ flock from Norfolk to Scotland to the Scilly Isles in response to rumors of rare sightings, George—with help from his lovely wife, Molly—gradually discerns the true markings of a killer. All he has to do is prove it . . . before the murderer strikes again.
My Review:
Ann Cleeves is one of those mystery writers that seemingly everyone has heard about, read, and absolutely raves over. That her work is the foundation of not one but two hit TV series (Shetland and Vera), just adds to that acclaim.
I’ve read a lot of mystery over my reading life, but she’s an author who has been recommended to me often, and I’ve always meant to read but never got the ‘round tuit’ for. So, when I saw that her early work was being republished and that eARCs were available it seemed like a golden opportunity to get in on the ground floor and here we are.
A Bird in the Hand, the first book in the George & Molly Palmer-Jones series, was the author’s first published book. In 1986. The world was a bit different then, and in a way that contemporary readers will notice right off. There were no cell phones. They had existed since 1973, but in 1986 they were still the size – and seemingly the weight – of an actual brick. This story would have been a LOT different if all the players had cell phones (mobile phones in Britain) even if signal availability would likely have been a bit ‘iffy’ in some of the remote locations where this story wanders.
This is one of those stories that begins “Tom French was dead, to begin with,” with, also, all due apologies to Charles Dickens and Ebenezer Scrooge as this is absolutely not a holiday story. But the opening is still apropos, as A Bird in the Hand begins with the discovery of well-known ‘twitcher’ Tom French’s dead body being discovered outside the popular ‘twitching’ and more than occasionally twitchy (in multiple meanings) fictional village of Rushy on the Norfolk coast of Britain.
‘Twitcher’ in this instance is very much a term of art applied to a subset of birdwatchers who are, come to think of it, kind of like storm chasers, although usually not with the threat of imminent death or dismemberment if they actually find the object of their pursuit. Twitchers, the British version at least, are those who obsessively chase down rare birds to tick them off their various lists.
Birdwatching is often seen as a genteel hobby. Twitching is at the extreme end of that hobby, where it can tip over from fascination into preoccupation and even downright mania.
Tom French was a twitcher, and a well-known and well-respected one in the community of twitchers. Notice I didn’t say well-liked because opinion is certainly divided on that score. And it looks like as well as likely that someone killed him over it.
Which is precisely what retired Home Office bureaucrat and on-again, off-again twitcher George Palmer-Jones has been asked to discover. Whether or not it was something to do with twitching that got Tom French killed – and whether or not a particular twitcher was responsible.
Or whether the ‘hobby’ that one young man’s father disapproved of so obviously, frequently and often led him down a path away from respectability into some kind of mania that went beyond the obsessive pursuit of birds.
Escape Rating B: I ended up with a few mixed feelings about this one, because it feels very much like a ‘portrait of the master as a young writer’ kind of thing. The author fully admits that this was her debut novel, that she never expected it would ever get published, and that there are plenty of things she would do differently if she had it to do over again. Which makes A Bird in the Hand a sort of fledgeling book in more ways than one.
So I’m trying my damndest to evaluate the work in hand, a book that is nearly FORTY years old, and not conflate what I think of it with what I know is said of her work now. Which doesn’t erase the knowledge that without this start the rest wouldn’t exist.
The thing about THIS book is that it introduces both a pair of amateur detectives, George Palmer-Jones and his wife Molly, AND the quirky, closed and rather insular community of twitchers. So there’s a lot here to be introduced and explained.
On the one hand, the twitchers are, in their own way, an analog for any difficult to breach community of defensive and occasionally derided hobbyists. They have a fascination that is not shared and is often outright dismissed by those who are not also caught up in its spell. If you’ve ever nerded out about anything, while twitching may not be your jam, the twitchers aren’t all that different from whatever group you flocked with are or were, just that the jargon is different.
The story does a more than good enough job of getting the reader into that tiny community. (Also, it reminded me a bit of Marty Wingate’s Birds of a Feather series, which begins with The Rhyme of the Magpie, which I confess I liked quite a bit better, possibly because it’s a LOT cozier and that’s more of what I was in the mood for.)
On the other hand, the characters in this story, including George and Molly, collectively aren’t all that likeable. In the case of the amateur investigator protagonists, I think it’s that we don’t know enough about them, yet, and so don’t empathize as much as I’d hoped to. It doesn’t help that the perspective is all George’s and he both angsts a lot and gets caught up in his own head, he doesn’t read the room very well and relies on Molly to smooth over his bluntness. And because we see her from his perspective, and probably a bit because this was written in 1985 or thereabouts, she’s more of a social helpmeet than she would be written today or honestly than it feels like she actually is.
But it’s also the twitcher community. Nearly everyone seems to be shady, everyone is judgmental both inside and outside, and no one seems to be happy or liking where they are in the world. It’s a community that’s rife with strife, to the point where it isn’t a surprise that someone got killed – or even that Tom French turned out to be the victim. It’s more that the perpetrator and their motivations come a bit out of left field and the investigation is muddled every step of the way because of all the grudges and rivalries held by seemingly everyone involved.
In the end, I liked this but didn’t love it. I was more intrigued than captivated by this particular book. At the same time, I’m still interested in seeing where the author went with this series, as well as her later work. So I’ll probably be back to see how George and Molly are doing sometime when I’m looking for another interesting mystery.