It's another "annoying recipe prologue but with book" because fuck you that's why.
After my mother died, my father put the books that she'd had with her hospital things into a bag and just left them at my house. I don't know how many of them she read; she had a lot of trouble focusing near the end and a lot of weakness in her hands. It feels weird, now that my father has made them my problem instead of simply donating them, to let them leave my house without making sure they've been read. Like somehow whoever bought them, whether it was Mum or someone who loved her, would have wasted their money if I can't confirm they've been read.
And maybe it will be a book I like and it can join my library and then that's sort of like a little thing Mum's left for me.
Steve Burrows' "A Shimmer of Hummingbirds" is not joining my library.
And I have another book in the series that I'll have to deal with, too.
On paper -- paper separate from the paper of the book itself -- it seems like a promising book from a series of themed mystery novels, with the hook being that the detective is an enthusiastic birder. The author's Canadian. I thought I was going to get some fun Canadian bird crimes.
He's an actual cop, though.
In a small town in northern England.
He is Canadian, he's just.
In England.
Also he's not in England, he's on vacation in Spain.
The book does open with a murder happening in the small town in northern England, though.
Don't worry, he's not actually solving it, that's left to the supporting cast and a figure from the detective's past he seems to have a complicated history with.
The detective is looking into some kind of crime his brother, who is also a birder, is accused of or did involving the deaths of some indigenous people that seems to have happened in the previous book?
And look.
Maybe I'm being unfair.
But I don't think mystery novels in a series where every book follows some kind of naming theme should require you to read the previous books to follow the plot of the main character.
This is only the fourth book! I don't think you've earned the right to have your previous books carrying so much establishing weight after three books!
Stylistically, Burrows seems to want to have his omniscient third person point of view cake and also eat his limited third person and that metaphor is as messy as his writing choices feel. He'll refer to characters by first name, last name, full name, job title interchangeably within the same page which scrapes on my brain in the same way that 'never use said' writing rules from grade six does, but worse, because I can recognize the latter originating from over-internalizing a well-meaning teacher's lesson on thesaurus use and expanding vocabulary.
Most irritatingly, Burrows repeatedly uses "swilling" to talk about an action that does not involve mouths. Get the fuck out of here with that shit, man. I'm going to misidentify a bird at you.