A SIEGE OF BITTERNS is the first book in Steve Burrows’s Birder Murder mystery series. It was published in free or inexpensive e-book format in 2014.
Detective Chief Inspector Domenic Jejeune of the Saltmarsh, North Norfolk Constabulary, is an incomer personally selected by Detective Chief Superintendent Colleen Shepherd for his talent, almost genius, at detection and the celebrity of his rescue of the Home Secretary’s daughter. The local CID, especially Detective Sergeant Danny Malk and Detective Constable Tony Holland, don’t know what to make of him, and their doubts only grow when local environmentalist / TV persoanlity Cameron Brae is found hanging from a tree, a hood over his head and chains on wrists and ankles. Baer had been an enthusiastic birder, competing to be the first to complete a county list of 400 bird species for Norfolk; his diary contains a notation days before his death of am bittern, which Jejeune (also a birder) interprets as American Bittern, a visitor seldom seen in Norfolk, He concludes that Brae’s death has to do with the contest. As he and the team investigate further, Jejeune realizes that Brae had been concerned with expansion of a wind farm that would impact marsh areas, and he comes to the conclusion that Brae had identified contaminants that were poisoning the marshes. He’s satisfied himself that Peter Largemount, developer of the wind farm, killed Brae, when someone blows Largemount away with a shotgun. If Largemont killed Brae, who killed Largemount? Back to square one, under increasing pressure from Chief Superintendent Shepherd and local MP Beverly Brennan for a quick, neat arrest.
I will definitely be reading more of Burrow’s Birder series, though one needs to be fluent in bird watching terminology and have some understanding of bird behavior to pick up on the clues to the solution of the cases. Cutting the book by fifty pages and reducing the “one step forward, two steps back” format would help. The identity of the polluter seems far-fetched.
Characters in A SIEGE OF BITTERNS are well done. I’m not sure, however, if DCI Jejeune is properly the protagonist; Sergeant Malk is a more sympathetic character in many ways. Jejeune still isn’t sure what he wants to be when he grows up. “...he envied Lindy, doing a job she genuinely cared about. Could he have ever gotten so passionate about his own work? His curse, if he cared to think about it that way, was that people considered him to have talents, a gift, even, for a job he neither liked nor particularly wanted to do. But when those talents were in the area of policing, well, he could fully understand how everybody from his parents back in Canada to his superiors would be urging him to follow his talents as far as they would take him. He had heard all the arguments, and he had long since stopped offering counters to them. Now he just did his work, as quietly and efficiently as possible, and said nothing.” (64) “ ‘So is this the part where you tell me you don’t want to do it any more?’ [Lindy] said quietly. It was. But do what, exactly. Be a media celebrity, a boy wonder, the Great White Hope of the police force? Or be a policeman, a detective, at all? What he did want, he didn’t really know. He just knew it wasn’t this, dwelling in the darkness of other people’s psyches, sifting through the layers of deception, uncovering their lies, their duplicity, their crimes.” (196-7) Jejeune is presumably quite young for his rank, but the constant self-doubt sounds more like a mid-life crisis than the thought patterns of a successful younger man. I can’t help wonder if Burrows intended the comparison of DCI Jejeune’s name to the adjective “jejune.” Other characters are well developed.
Burrows accurately captures the atmosphere that greets the incomer Jejeune: “If Malk could have put a name to the mood, he would have gone for curiosity rather than anticipation. He was already aware of one or two rumblngs from those who had seen Jejeune in action at the crime scene. Now they were wondering if that performance was a one-off. Malk doubted that anyone had gone so far as to make up their mind about him just yet, but anybody who came to Saltmarsh with this kind of fanfare wasn’t going to get the benefit of the doubt for long. Reputation didn’t count for much in this part of the world. They were going to want to see some proof that the DCS’s star recruit was worth the blaze of publicity that had accompanied his appointment.” (35)
Setting is all important in A SIEGE OF BITTERNS, opening as it does: “At its widest point, the marsh stretched almost a quarter of a mile across the north Norfolk coastline. Here the river that had flowed lie a silver ribbon through the rolling farmlands to the west finally came to rest, spilling its contents across the flat terrain, smoothing out the uneven contours, seeping silently into every corner. From this point on, tiny rivulets, no wider than a man’s stride, would trace their way between the dunes and shale banks to complete the river’s final journey out to sea. At the margin of land and water, the marsh belongs to neither, and it carried the disquieting wildness of all forsaken things. Onshore winds rattled the dry reeds like hollow bones. The peaty tang of decaying vegetation and wet earth hung in the air. An hour earlier, the watery surface of the wetland had shimmered like polished copper; a fluid mirror for the last rays of the setting sun. But now, the gathering gloom had transformed the marsh into a dark, featureless emptiness.” (9)
A SEIGE OF BITTERNS (A-)
