A Rant of Ravens (Birdwatcher’s Mystery Series)

A Rant of Ravens is the first entry in Christine Goff’s Birdwatcher’s Mystery series. The novel follows Rachel Wilder Stanhope, a non-birder from New York City, as she tries to recover from a failed marriage by visiting her aunt’s estate just outside of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. Of course, it doesn’t turn out to be the relaxing trip that she had anticipated.

We birders are used to seeing unusual things in the field, but not anything like Rachel’s first foray with birders. She finds a dead body. And it just happens to be a reporter from a bird magazine that she had seen arguing with her aunt Miriam. To make matters worse, while Rachel, the birders she’s met, and the local sheriff are puzzling out motives, her aunt and three falcons from her raptor rehab facility go missing.

A Rant of Ravens is a fun story, never taking itself too seriously. It contains some excitement, like multiple attempts on the main character’s life, but is not at all gory. The plot was ok; like any good murder-mystery, the culprit wasn’t obvious, but wasn’t completely out of left-field, either. One thing that I’m very happy about is that the author doesn’t attempt to force in a romantic relationship between Rachel and any of the seemingly available men that she meets. Perhaps that would be appropriate in one of the subsequent novels, but it would have felt clichéd here.

One negative is that the characters are a bit one-dimensional. You don’t really get to know any of them, with the exception of the protagonist, so they weren’t very interesting. We get to know Rachel a little better, but even then I didn’t get very attached to her.

Having a non-birding main character means that everything related to birds in the story, whether about birding, falconry, or rehabilitation, needs to be explained. This makes it much more accessible to non-birding readers. For the most part, the author gets the birding right. I did get a chuckle out of a few things, though, such as a birding club following standardized rules of order for weekly meetings and that a birding magazine would have a hard-core investigative journalist on staff.

The version of A Rant of Ravens reviewed here is a Kindle eBook version that was released in 2014. The book, however, was originally published in 2000. It is a little dated in places – a key plot point hinged on some missing floppy disks, for example – but the story remains just as entertaining and relevant as the day it was published.

Recommendation

A Rant of Ravens makes a nice break from the identification guides, family monographs, and other books birders normally read, especially for those who are fans of the murder mystery genre.