Bird's-Eye View

July 2, 2001
Bird-watching is the clever hook for Freedman's compulsively readable thriller about a troubled former college professor who witnesses a murder of international consequences while he's hidden in a swamp watching for his beloved whooping crane. Banished from academia for having an affair with a dean's wife, Fritz Tullis is trying to regroup on his family's sprawling estate in southern Maryland. While photographing the rare and exotic bird, Tullis sees a plane touch down on a neighbor's airstrip. Three men get out. As Tullis surreptitiously photographs the action—more as a nosy neighbor than anything else—one of the men is shot to death, and his body is loaded back on the plane. Frightened, Tullis agonizes for several days about what to do, until the body of the dead man turns up in a dumpster in Baltimore and is identified as that of a Russian diplomat. Then Tullis starts poking around. The owner of the airstrip is James Roach, an assistant secretary of state with a long past in arms sales. Despite warnings that Roach is not a man to mess with, Tullis blunders forth, risking not only his own life but that of his patrician mother. Others involved in Tullis's quest are a gorgeous Harvard ornithologist with a surprising secret; Tullis's former Yale roommate, a D.C. attorney; and a local detective. It's encouraging to see Freedman (Above the Law) move out of his legal thriller comfort zone. Powered by a strong first-person point of view, his latest is not only a first-rate suspense drama but also an affecting portrait of a man in personal and professional crisis. Tullis, who eventually finds a perverse sort of solace in his pursuit, is self-absorbed, directionless and a bit selfish, but Freedman makes him engaging. Agent, Robert Lescher.

April 15, 2001
Fritz is out looking for whooping cranes on his estate in Maryland, but instead he sees a plane land and three men disembark one of whom gets shot minutes later. When a little research reveals that the landing strip belongs to a CIA official, Fritz is up and running to make sure the murder doesn't stay buried.

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2001
History professor Fritz Tullis has been dumped by the University of Texas after romancing the wife of a department chair. Reduced to living in a rebuilt sharecropper's shack on his family's property in southern Maryland, he fills his time by smoking plenty of dope, drinking whiskey and beer, and shooting film of the birds that roost in the surrounding cypress swamps. On one early-morning birding expedition, he unexpectedly witnesses--and films--a murder at a secluded runway on his new neighbor's property. He soon learns that the victim was a high-ranking foreign diplomat and that his new neighbor is the assistant secretary of state. Although he knows he's playing way out of his league, he begins to investigate and is soon assisted in his endeavor by a comely ornithologist. Freedman slows the story way down by employing a narrator too fond of taking his own emotional temperature, which he seems to do on an almost minute-by-minute basis. But those able to overlook this tic will find some diverting reading here from an author who regularly hits the best-seller lists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)