Connie
does not remember anything before the moment she fell downstairs
ten years ago, when she was twelve. She knows back then, before
they moved to the small village by the sea where they live
now, her father was doing well and owned a museum where he
kept his creations. But what happened the night of her fall
and the reasons for their moving, she can’t recall.
Lately, as his father drowns his sorrows in alcohol, Connie
has taken up his work: preserving birds as they were when
they were alive.
When,
early in the story, the body of a woman is discovered near
their house, Connie’s memories start coming back. She
feels that somehow the woman’s death is related to her
past and to her father’s mysterious behavior of late.
With the help of Harry, a young man from the nearby city who
has come to the village searching for his own father, Connie
will fight to prove her father’s innocence and stop
the chain of murders that follow the first. Powerful men will
fall as the story unfolds, a story as mysterious and dark
as the birds that, as the story begins, flow to their death
on Saint Mark’s Night, the night legend tells those
to die in the coming year will see their fate.
Although
the pace of the story drags a little at times, I read on for
the mystery and because I loved the setting: a bleak landscape
of flat marshes only a storm away from being flooded by the
unforgiving tides. A setting so powerful that it feels like
a character.
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