Book Description
Michael Harrier has built his reputation on a system no one else uses. Every contract comes with two targets. One dies. Someone else takes the blame.
It’s worked flawlessly for years.
Until now.
What should be a clean hit starts to unravel. A woman with a violent past pulls him off course. A single mistake threatens to expose everything. And for the first time, Harrier is forced to improvise.
Meanwhile, LAPD homicide sergeant Jordan Becker is hunting a killer he can’t pin down.
But he’s built his career on getting results where others stall out.
The case doesn’t follow any rules. The evidence doesn’t hold. The story keeps shifting. And the deeper Becker digs, the clearer it becomes he’s chasing someone smarter, faster, and always just out of reach.
As Harrier’s world tightens and Becker starts to break through, both men are pulled into a game where every move has consequences—and no one is as untouchable as they think.
Because this time, getting away with murder isn’t the hardest part.
It’s controlling what comes next.
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My Book Review
RATING: 5 out of 5 Stars
BIRDS OF PREY DON’T SING by Joe Cary is engrossing dark thriller featuring an assassin traumatized by his past and living by his own moral code and the damaged detective determined to catch him. This is the author’s debut novel, and it is truly difficult to put down even with some emotionally difficult to read scenes.
The main characters in this novel are Michael Harrier, the assassin who makes the person ordering his service pick one victim to kill and one victim to frame for the murder, Chensea, a woman on the run from her Vegas bookie ex who has Michael questioning his personal rules, and LAPD homicide detective Jordan Becker who will do anything to get his man which is what has gotten him in trouble before. All three of these characters are fully developed in all their shades of gray and black. Even as you learn more about each, you may feel you want to like them, or excuse something they have done, but there is no white knight in this novel.
The plot and pace of this novel is flawless. The step-by-step investigation is realistic, and each minute flaw made by Michael is a reward to Jordan’s doggedness. The action is intense and there is a lot of blood, so it is not good for the squeamish, but what I expect for a novel of this type. The ending is not what I was expecting and frankly, I am still not sure how I feel about it. I believe it is a conclusion that will be discussed by many every time this book is read.
I highly recommend this dark and gritty assassin thriller!
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About the Author
Joe Cary’s stories have appeared in One Story, XRAY Literary Magazine, BULL, MonkeyBicycle, and elsewhere, and also earned a Special Mention in the 2020 Pushcart Prize Anthology and a Best of the Net nomination. A former Angeleno, he currently lives with his family in Philadelphia, where he fights money laundering, fraud, and other financial crimes. Birds of Prey Don’t Sing is his first novel.
