Frank Pavlicek finds the body of a teenage boy when out hunting with his hawk. Having been a homicide detective with the NYPD, he studies the crime scene. When he finds a wallet with the boy's ID and money, he is unnerved to see his daughter's name and phone number written on one of the bills. He needs to find out how Nicole is involved.

Nicole is arrested for drug dealing before Frank can talk to her about the boy's murder. Now Frank must solve both who is dealing drugs and who is the murderer.

This is a suspenseful mystery the curves keeps on striking you from the main path. Best of all the cast of characters is well developed as the story progresses. The solution is a twist in the path. ( )

This book was published to great acclaim in 2001, with Shamus, Anthony, and Agatha Award nominations for Best First Novel. Good for Mr. Straka but I don't get it. The falconry angle is interesting, but the characters and their behavior make no sense to me.

A teenage former drug dealer is murdered. Frank discovers the body while hunting and discovers evidence linking the victim to his daughter Nicole. In an unrelated incident, Nicole is booked for cocaine possession with intention to distribute based on circumstantial evidence. Frank's ex-wife, Nicole's mother, a very wealthy widow, thinks the arrest isn't important. (Is mama nuts???) Mama hires the family lawyer, who is a known drunk with no criminal law experience. The State prosecuting atty admits that there is no case. Yet the judge denies bail. Nicole is a high school senior from a wealthy step-family in rural Virginia! What kind of flight risk here? There is no way a minor child, especially a white girl, would be held without bail for a non-violent crime. The child protection people would be all over it.

There are loads of other off kilter elements and strange behavior by everyone, including Frank and his buddy Jake Toronto (who is curiously affectless for a sidekick). There is too much aimless dialogue for me.

The book contains several odd locutions and strange sentences. A woman's haircut is "somewhere between a crewcut and a bob". That's about 8 inches in my fave salon. One howler, that might be a Brash transcription error: "His bony fingers worked methodically to coil an orange power cord he'd been using to trim the hedge." I stopped reading halfway through.

I received a review copy of "A Witness Above: A Frank Pavlicek Mystery" by Andy Straka (Brash) through NetGalley.com. It was originally published in 2001 by Signet. ( )

This was an interesting story that holds promise for a great series to come. I liked Pavlicek as a main character. He's smart and determined, but also has some all too human flaws.

I know nothing about falcons or the sport of "falconry". While we're given some insight into this, that aspect does not overshadow the story. I was intrigued by Pavlicek's relationship with his bird, and I found this approach refreshing and unique. We never learn exactly how or why Pavlicek became a falconer, and I would have liked a little background on that to help me to better understand his character.

My main problem with this book was the plot's execution. We have a lot of characters, with several offshoots in the storyline. Consequently, the story's path forward often feels murky and convoluted. Paradoxically, the 'bad guy' feels glaringly obvious. I was not at all surprised by this "twist". In fact, I think I groaned when that was revealed.

I also felt that we were left with several loose ends. For instance, Pavlicek's ex-wife plays a vital role in their daughter's problems. I can't get into exactly what that role is without giving spoilers, but she does some things that put her daughter's future and life in danger. Yet this is never sufficiently explained. Also, Pavlicek himself does two highly questionable things in relation to his daughter and her predicament. Again, I can't say what exactly without giving away details. For me, though, two actions in particular seemed totally out of sync with his overwhelming concern and determination to work outside the legal box in order to do what was best for her.

The characters, as a whole, feel stereotypical. We have the nasty, money-hungry ex-wife, the problem teen, the black Christians, and the gangbangers. I would have liked some deviation from these stereotypes. Pavlicek and his friend Toronto are really the only characters who stand out as unique.

One last thing that caught my attention throughout is more an observation than a specific critique. I assume this book is a revised edition of an earlier release. Details, at times, feel like they were written prior to the digital revolution, and were overlooked during revision. Cell phones is one such issue. Through parts of the book, characters behave as if cell phones were not ubiquitous. I found myself wondering why Pavlicek would give out the phone number of a friend's home where he was staying. Then people couldn't find him, because he wasn't there. Then suddenly he had his cell phone, though he rarely used it and didn't receive calls that way in emergencies.

Despite what I perceive as the flaws, this is still an interesting read. I think Pavlicek could lead us on some fascinating adventures in the future.

*I was provided with a review copy of this book by the publisher, via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest review.* ( )

Frank Pavlicek, former cop, is out hunting with his Red-tailed Hawk, Armistead, when he stumbles over a body. In a plot full of coincidences, it turns out that the deceased knew Frank's teen-aged daughter. So he tampers with the scene, and then, of course, involves himself in the investigation.

There are punctuation, capitalization, and spelling errors (apparently the publisher's) in the Kindle edition that at times obscure the meaning of the text, and weird usage ("heralded" for "hailed", "epitaph" for "epithet" being two that come immediately to mind) which are apparently the author's. Intransitive verbs are employed as transitives. Run-on sentences alternate with lonely little fragments. And then there are the redundancies like the "bolero vest".

The dialogue is wooden when it's not being impenetrable: One character inexplicably speaks as if English were her second language (it is not), and conversations are riddled with non-sequiturs. The narrative is third-rate, too. Sentences that should be transitional are parked in the middles of paragraphs instead of at the ends; other paragraphs contain stray sentences conveying completely irrelevant information. The characterization is so thin that I can't remember who is who, other than the bird, who, although more memorable than the human characters, still isn't given much personality.

Speaking of birds, neither falconry in general nor this bird in particular are as central to the story as one is given to expect. The author throws around esoteric falconry terms without explanations for the uninitiated--easy enough to include smoothly if he only wished to--and these are not the sort of words found in one's bedside Merriam-Webster. So it has an air of showing off to it. And don't plan on wading through the book just to get to the few hunting scenes, if you are a falconer or simply a nature-lover, because they aren't well-written enough to be worth your effort. Sibley's guides contain better physical descriptions of the birds. And you'll get no sense of the weather or the terrain or the thrill of the thing because the author's vocabulary seems bereft of appropriate modifiers. Instead, we get incomprehensible phrases like "muddy haze."

In the Foreword, Straka writes about "growing" a story and even mentions having a grammar maven ready to hand, but the book shows evidence of neither. It's carelessly written, and not worth much more than the 99 cents Kindle is charging for it. All-in-all, very disappointing, especially as Straka came highly recommended by a falconer/author of some repute. I expected to like it. I wanted to like it. Alas, I did not. And you probably won't either. ( )

The first book in the popular Frank Pavlicek series. Falconer and private investigator Frank Pavlicek is hunting with his red-tailed hawk in the Virginia woods when he stumbles across a young man’s body and evidence that implicates his own teenage daughter. Soon, his daughter is in jail.

Frank’s past as a disgraced former NYPD homicide detective is coming back to haunt him. And his reputation and life are on the line…. ( )