A southern California mystery with an eye for the naturally beautiful and an ear for small town secrets
“‘The mountain taught me these past few months that truth exists whether people want to hear it or not, whether it makes them comfortable or not. The land remembers every footstep, every drop of blood, every betrayal. And it doesn’t care what anyone thinks about the messenger.’”
Brandt Holme is an ambitious ornithologist with plans to build a bird sanctuary and secure a legacy of conservation in the southern California mountain town of Halconido.
Yet, as this book begins, Brandt is found dead under perplexing circumstances—it seems a chunk of blue granite fell out of the clear sky onto his head. As Sheriff Will Aguayo, a local man with Spanish and Native American heritage delves into the case, he uncovers more and more inexplicable details: shapes drawn in the earth beside Holme’s dead body; a recent spate of fires surrounding the Holme property and silver strands of beads nearby; a misanthropic neighbor with a longstanding grudge against Brandt Holme; and a wife and children who appear strangely poised and secretive, each in their own right.
To piece these clues together and sift the relevant facts from a tidal wave of red herrings and false leads, Detective Aguayo dives into the town, interviewing locals and relying on his preternatural attunement to the ways of the natural world.
“It’s the calm that bothers him the most. A forest has a rhythm, and someone’s pressed the mute button on this clearing. He closes his eyes and listens for the sounds that should be there: the rustle of small creatures in the underbrush, fence lizards and ground squirrels, the chatter of finches, the annoyance of jays. Instead, there’s only a thick hush, the kind that follows in the wake of a predator.”
O’Neal gives special attention to the natural world, a distinguishing feature from the traditional detective fiction fare. There are gorgeous descriptions of the landscapes and the behavior of animals and a sense that these are of equal importance and relevance to what the humans in the story do.
In many ways, this attention to the non-human world explains the choice of making the victim at the core of this novel an ornithologist. Brandt Holme is both a man with a clear passion for birds and an enigma, someone who seems to disappear the more Will Aguayo learns about him and speaks to the people who knew him in life. For some reason, his proposed conservation project is not welcomed by environmental activists in the community. Somehow, despite his care for animals, his children are estranged to various degrees. These contradictions pile up with a quiet, frustrating inevitability that is set in stark contrast to the elegance of scenes of woodpeckers, even ones that wake Aguayo in the morning, and other animals that move through the world without the contradictions of humans.
“An owl hoots like a monk tolling a bell, and in the underbrush, something scampers, quick little feet brushing leaves aside, and a second owl answers from farther up the ridge. He takes in a chorus of things not seen: claws against bark, wings stretch- ing unseen in the dark, the chitter of a ground squirrel.”
While this emphasis on nature differentiates the story, it never strays too far from the conceits of the mystery genre. Here we see gossiping and lying locals—people with things to hide that may or may not impact the case. The novel does a convincing job demonstrating how the intimacy of a small town easily veers into a feeling of being watched and how that, in turn, breeds its own particular brand of secrecy.
“‘I may not have what everybody else has got: the wife, the kids, the dinner parties, the small talk about weather and sports… But you know what I do have? Time, attention, the ability to notice when something is wrong…’ His hands clench into fists. ‘Brandt Holme had everything: respect, recognition, a family, important work. But he was destroying the very thing he claimed to protect.’”
Yet for all its deft maneuvering around different characters—the proprietors of the local general store, the fire department chief, neighbors, and family members—the book occasionally stumbles into long, drawn out scenes that make it difficult for a sense of tension to develop. Aguayo’s interviews take surprisingly long and become conversational affairs that make salient details and moments of tension feel muted, while also using dialogue to provide overly direct background information and summary. Even as the many different threads and misdirections coalesce into a coherent picture of Halconido, the crime, and the players involved, the book ends on a climactic high, but it can feel a touch unfinished.
A richly imagined mystery about a dead ornithologist in a beautiful mountainous California landscape, A Death on Halconido follows a detective as he comes to understand a rural town and the secrets it is hiding.
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