"Bird spotting in a small town" by Sophie Morton-Thomas

An audio book.

In the short prologue someone's carrying something. "They'll find out soon."

Fran (her first-person PoV) lives in a cottage on the Norfolk coast. Her parents died 6 years ago. She owns a caravan site. She likes bird spotting. It's January. Her husband is Dom. Her son is Bruno (10). Her sister Roz (a dawn jogger) is married to Ellis. They've recently arrived, living in a caravan, paying no rent. They have a daughter Sadie. The new teacher and Sadie don't get on. Sadie is a bad influence on Bruno.

Tad (his first-person PoV) is a traveller living in the field next to the camp-site. His wife is dead. He has a daughter, Jade, who's mostly mute. His brother Charley killed someone in their last place - supposedly in self-defence.

Fran notices that Roz's caravan has a broken window, blood round the edges.

Sadie is excluded from school. The teacher and Ellis disappear on the same day. Sadie and Tad chat. Charley and Bruno chat. Someone is beheading birds. Someone has stolen rare eggs.

The teacher's body is found by Tad and Dom. Fran has circumstantial evidence that Dom and Roz are having an affair. Fran and Dom are drifting apart. Their cottage burns down (which they seem very calm about) and they move to separate caravans.

The book has symbolic underpinning (the bird symbolism, the outsiders, etc). I think that works. I'm less convinced by the language and the main plot idea.

At the end the plot explodes - the teacher was Charley's wife. Bruno killed her. Charley and Tad had dragged the body from the school and take the blame so that Bruno doesn't suffer. Bruno is Ellis's son, not Dom's. It's almost a parody of an "unreliable narrator" novel.

Fran has a rich vocabulary and poetic voice - "embarrassment skitters under my skin", "nudge him from his slumber", etc. Tad uses "angst-ridden", etc. Fair enough I suppose, though the same characters have literary lapses too. "My heart" begins many sentences and clauses. There's a tendency to replace verbs with nouns -

• "A wave of heat powers through the skin on my face"
• "A realisation jolts in my mind"
• "makes a squawking sound" (rather than "squawks")
• "A smile is stretching across my face"

I don't like "takes an intake of breath". Within a few paragraphs there's "when I was down", "calm my sister down", "meltdown", "broke down".

Other reviews

• crimefictionlover (She’s even had a hide built by the marsh, but when she finds a terns’ nest elsewhere, she regrets the hide’s location ... the children grow curious about the travellers and start visiting their camp ... Via the characters and the setting, we find ourselves on the fringe – of society, and perhaps of reality and of sanity)