A rare and unrecorded sea bird captures all the birders attention whilst right under their noses the most fanatical birder of them all disappears . . .
Later, Greg Franks's corpse, the head bludgeoned, is found floating in the sea. Had it not been for Greg Franks, amateur detective George Palmer-Jones would not have been on the bird-watching trip in Cornwall to the first place. He had been hired by Greg Franks's anxious parents to try and persuade their errant son to return home. George would have turned the case down flat but the offer of a free weekend's bird watching was too tempting to resist. Now, he must unhappily shoulder the burden of finding why the young man had been murdered.
Who hated Franks enough to kill him? Almost everyone, it seems . . .