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Reviewed: Bird Brained (A Rachel Porter Mystery) By Jessica Speart (Avon Books, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishing, copyright 1999, ISBN 0-380-79290-7)
This is the fourth book in a series that features the continuing adventures of U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent Rachel Porter. I love murder-mysteries and I am also very interested in wildlife, its preservation and the battle against illegal smuggling of wildlife, in general, parrots in particular. So when I saw this book and read the back cover I could not put it back on the shelf. This is Porter's first foray into the world of parrot smuggling, as she deals with a different endangered species in each novel (having battled smugglers of monkeys, alligators and tortoises in previous books). She also moves from locale to locale in each book. In this story, she operates out of Miami. While tracking down a tip about some illegally smuggled parrots, she stumbles across a dead smuggler whose birds have all disappeared. Obviously, murder is not something fish and wildlife officers are paid to investigate, but against the orders of her boss, she proceeds to try to solve a case that grows more and more complex with the turn of each page. Soon she finds herself moving in circles that include Cuban cigar smugglers, gay pornographers and anti-Castro arms dealers. I enjoyed the book for the most part, mainly because of the parrot theme. There were moments I cringed, thinking about the treatment (the book describes smugglers drugging birds with shots of tequila to sneak them in quietly) and fate of smuggled parrots (according to the book, there are more escaped exotic birds in south Florida than there are in the vanishing Amazon rainforest). I found the solving and wrap-up of the case to be somewhat abrupt, as if the author was typing along then suddenly realized she was running out of space and time, and tried to tie everything up in a rush. There were a few loose ends that never did seem to be explained explicitly, and I felt a little disappointed that way. As a parrot lover, I was also disappointed that the criminals were never really punished for parrot smuggling per se; they were prosecuted for other "higher" crimes. That's the way it is in life, though, so it is realistic that way. Because of that, the book works emotionally even though there may be a few weak spots in the story. That realism paints a sad picture of humanity, with its egocentric approach to the world, an approach that views humans as the only "important" species on the planet. There are many people like the smugglers portrayed in the book, and as long as there is even one person like that left on the planet, humankind will be limited in its growth and ability to evolve to a higher level. - Reviewed by John Geary "The
majority of wildlife crimes are hard to prove, which explains why endangered
critters have exploded into the latest rage in the criminal world ... nearly as
lucrative as dealing in drugs." |
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