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by Ian Smith
ISBN 0385511361
$24.95 Hardcover
Doubleday Books
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“Ian Smith’s debut novel, The Blackbird Papers, is exceptional on all levels: the characters and setting are fresh, the plot is riveting, and you feel like you are in totally new territory. Take note of a career about to soar.”—Harlan Coben, author of No Second Chance
A rainy night. A stranded motorist. A good Samaritan. A Nobel Prize-winning professor.—All are the setup for a shocking murder designed to cover up an even more sinister crime.
World-renowned Dartmouth professor Wilson Bledsoe is returning from a party when he encounters a broken-down pickup on the secluded country road to his home. The next day, the discovery of his body with a vicious racist epithet carved into his chest leads to the quick arrest of two loathsome white supremacists.
The local authorities seem ready to accept the case at face value as a racial hate crime. However, the murdered professor’s brother, FBI agent Sterling Bledsoe, has inserted himself into the investigation and isn’t ready to buy into this pat solution. A look around his brother’s lab and brief interviews with his students and colleagues pique Sterling’s curiosity about Wilson’s pet project: a nearly completed paper on the mysterious deaths of hundreds of local blackbirds.
Fast-paced and cleverly constructed, The Blackbird Papers introduces a major new talent in mystery and crime fiction.
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