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Title/Author

Birdkill

Alexander McNabb

Average Review Rating Average Rating 8/10 (1 Review)
Book Details

Publisher : CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Published : 2016

Copyright : Alexander McNabb 2016

ISBN-10 : PB 1-52398-673-5
ISBN-13 : PB 978-1-52398-673-6

Publisher's Write-Up

Robyn’s recent past is missing. And she’s not sure she wants it back. Robyn Shaw has amnesia, a recent trauma so great her mind has veiled her memory. When she starts a new life teaching at a research institute devoted to exceptionally gifted children, the last thing she expects is for those blocked events to be lying in wait for her.

Plagued by dreams of death and blood that threaten to overwhelm her, Robyn is fragile and vulnerable. When she meets student Martin Oakley plucking sparrows from the air and breaking their necks, she is pitched into a vicious battle that threatens her grasp of her own mind.

Attacked from without and within, Robyn struggles to maintain her increasingly tenuous hold on reality as journalist Mariam Shadid races to discover the dreadful secret buried in Robyn’s past before her friend is consumed by insanity.

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Reader Reviews

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Review by Chrissi (310316) Rating (8/10)

Review by Chrissi
Rating 8/10
Birdkill is one of those fascinating yet slightly macabre books that hooks you with a conspiracy and just keeps pulling you along. It opens with a mysterious young lady, the survivor of a middle eastern terror incident, so far so sadly familiar, but we then meet her as Robyn, a teacher whose memory of whatever happened is now gone. She has had therapy and is now looking forward to starting a new job working with special children, children whose intelligence makes mainstream schooling an unsuitable prospect as they are beyond many of the teachers with whom they have been placed.

On her arrival, she thinks that she sees a boy calling down sparrows and killing them, a pile of feathered corpses at his feet. It would appear to be wrong but something calls to her, to go and also let go, to die and be free. Her relationship with this man-child is pivotal in the story, and threatens any form of sanity that she has achieved. Robyn reaches out to her friend Mariam, a female journalist whom she met in therapy over a shared love of a region in the Lebanon, whose investigative skills have recently won her a position with a whistle blower web-zine.

Mariam finds herself with documentation from an American whistle blower about clandestine research and military operations in the Middle East and little by little, she realises that this is bigger than she anticipated and may be of great danger to both of them.

This is one of those books that has a somewhat visceral effect on you after having read it, the imagery is so vivid and real. It has the best bits of a good thriller, the tension, a plausible conspiracy, the rather pantomime shouting at our heroine that it might be behind her, and the looming sense of threat. I really enjoyed this, it reads well, the plot is tight and well written, it so deserves a chance to be read and enjoyed by a wide audience.
Chrissi (31st March 2016)

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