Tiny Celie Sheppard is given to the care of eight-year-old farm boy, Robert, but turns the family’s fortunes, and perhaps their sentiments about her, when at six years old, she shows a talent for climming. In a makeshift harness fashioned by Robert, she returns from under the overhang on the edge of her family’s holding, Metland Farm, with an extremely rare red guillemot egg. Egg Broker George Ambler is beside himself: what won’t a collector pay for such a beauty!
Almost a century on, Patrick Fort has been washing dishes at the Rorke’s Drift for three years and not yet tired of it. Returning home one winters evening, he discovers his friend and neighbour, Weird Nick, and Nick’s mum Jen gagged and bound in their unlit house. Two men in ski masks (it’s not even snowing!) with cable ties to secure the residents of Ty Newydd have ransacked the place. The only thing missing is a red egg in a fancy carved box.
Belatedly, Nick has discovered it’s illegal to sell, or even own, wild bird eggs, but the fleeting listing on Facebook Marketplace was sufficient, it seems, to make their little Welsh cottage a target. Legal or no, he wants the egg back. Patrick’s brilliant deductive work leads them to the probable thief, and Nick ropes in his unwilling friend to confront eggman456.
That doesn’t end well: “Before Nick could open his mouth, the big man grabbed him by the front of his jumper, yanked him forward, headbutted him, then withdrew and slammed the door. It all happened so fast that Patrick was left open-mouthed with amazement, already replaying it in his head. The door, the arm, the fist, the head, the door. It was like a very violent cuckoo clock.”
Before they finally locate the egg, and several more like it, there’s a courtroom scene with lots of shouting, a visit to a museum with thousands of eggs, and a jaw-droppingly vindictive destruction of a felon’s collection.
Patrick has a too-close encounter with dog droppings, is an accidental stowaway in the car of a nasty, violent man, and has to climb through a toilet window. A balaclava and a potato masher play significant roles. At one point, Nick asks where his sense of adventure is: “Patrick didn’t answer. He’d already accidentally had one adventure in his life and it had been very stressful. He didn’t really fancy another.”
Told through multiple narratives and a dual timeline, Bauer gradually reveals the path that the Metland egg takes from 1920’s Yorkshire to modern-day Wales and beyond. She gives the reader some wonderful descriptive prose “…barristers in yellowing wigs and black cloaks flitted between them like giant bats”, and only the hardest hearts won’t have a lump in the throat at the poor guillemot’s ordeal. There’s plenty of action drama which, together with the dialogue, offers some very black humour. Fans can only hope this isn’t the last we’ll see of Patrick Fort. Utterly brilliant.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by the publisher
