HOME TO ROOST

Keith Calder, the author's gun-expert/sleuth, has a small but crucial role in this balky adventure. The narrator is Detective-Sergeant Ian Fellowes, newly posted from Edinburgh to Calder's Scottish Borders area. Ian is in love with Calder's daughter Deborah, who runs the Pentland Gun Club and one day persuades him to join a pigeon shoot. The day ends with the disappearance of farmer fan Kerr, whose body turns up days later, loaded with arsenic. Fellowes leads an investigation that drags through old feuds, new poachers, and the tiniest details of each shooter's observations and location--until Calder comes up with the barely comprehensible solution. No joy here for animal activists or for lovers of well-wrought puzzles. Hammond (Whose Dog Are You?, p. 362) has done much, much better.