Cris Freddi

Sunday Times review of Pelican Blood

Novels involving multiple murder, second-chance love affairs and birdwatching come along as rarely as the ivory gull that the three twitcher protagonists of Pelican Blood are keen to glimpse. They drive together to Scotland to see it; one of the trio, however, already has the blood of a rare-egg collector on his hands and, by the end of the book, he will have dispatched another menace to the avian population. Freddi could easily have zeroed in on these anoraked obsessives as soft targets for satire and neglected the human dynamic, but his sensitive treatment of the rekindled romance between artist Stevie and the trigger-happy narrator reveals subtle emotional shadings. Bill Oddie is unlikely to approve of a novel with such a wonky moral compass, which is just one of the many good reasons for reading it.

Trevor Lewis