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- The Blackbird Papers
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- Author: Ian Smith
- Reviewer: Sonali T. Sikchi
- Publisher: Doubleday, New York
- Format: Adult, Fiction, Hardcover, 326 Pages, 2004, $24.95
- ISBN: 0385511361
- Rating: * *½ Quills
- www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0385511361/scriquil
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- Wilson Bledsoe, a Nobel-prize winning wealthy Dartmouth professor of ethnobiology, is a popular teacher, a sought-after doctorate advisor, in a loving marriage, an owner of a red Mercedes, and is one of few African-Americans on the faculty. One night, he fails to reach home while driving from a party held in his honor. Local New Hampshire and Vermont police first conclude it is kidnapping for ransom. But when Wilson's body is found brutally murdered, they conclude it is racially motivated and arrest the leaders of a local hate gang.
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- However, when his brother Sterling Bledsoe, a maverick FBI agent, is informed, he senses that this conclusion is too pat, too convenient — it is what the perpetrators of the crime want everyone to take at face value. As he starts interviewing different people, a whole underlying sinister crime emerges. Indeed things, and especially people, are not at all what they seem on the surface. (They rarely are!) In particular, Sterling's curiosity is piqued by Wilson's latest pet project, the journal paper on blackbirds.
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- For a debut novel, Ian Smith has shown himself to be a storyteller who can hold your attention from beginning to the end and plot a tale with layers of crime and detective sleuthing. His thorough research of the place, police work and biology of blackbirds lends depth and credibility to the events in the story, while grounding the reader firmly in time and place.
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- The biggest clunkers for me were the stick action figures Smith has employed. Even though Smith gives us some insight into Sterling's emotional state, Sterling never came alive for me, neither did I care for him or anyone else in the story. While this sort of characterless style has been made popular by the John Grishams and Dan Browns of recent years, you only have to read Elizabeth George to know what a huge impact well-crafted personable characters have on a mystery story.
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