Birds of Prey Don't Sing by Jay Cary

Now this is an interesting premise.

Michael Harrier (with any number of aliases) is a gun for hire. Quite good at it. The book opens 

up with him in sniper mode in Africa. A squad of big game hunters have teamed up with 

poachers to do some hunting off the books, off the reservation. Endangered? Who cares.

 Harrier lines the poachers and the hunters up in his sights and picks them off one-by-one, 

leaving one survivor (on purpose). For a healthy paycheck. From whom? He doesn’t care. Did 

his research, took the job, killed the targets, left the survivor who will eventually get blamed for 

 the carnage.

Part 1:

You see, Harrier’s corner of the hired assassin market is that he only takes jobs where he is 

supplied with two names: the TV (target victim)  and the SV (surviving victim). The TV is 

obvious. The SV is who gets framed for the murder. 

Harrier’s next job (for which he’ll get $3 million) seems like an impossible task. Kill a known (but 

never ‘convicted’) pedophile priest (the TV) and blame God (the SV) for the priest’s untimely 

death. He’s been hired by a father whose adult son was repeatedly abused by the priest when 

his son was serving as the parrish alter boy years earlier,  but the assaults were never proven 

by the police or the Catholic church despite intense investigations. 

That’s the setup. Killing the priest is a chinch. Framing God is an altogether more difficult 

assignment. Harrier investigates the priest and studies how death is portrayed in the Bible. 

After considerable research into Old and New Testament descriptions, he comes up with a 

plan. A plan that leaves virtually no possible clues that God, not a man, killed the priest.

Once he puts his plan into play, Harrier has to confront the priest first. The interaction between 

Harrier and the priest as the scene is set up is a wonderful exchange of not necessarily good 

and evil, they both are evil, but of how the plan was developed from both a practical and 

religious perspective. 

Part 2:

The next stage of any plan like this is to get away with it. Once the first part of the assignment 

is completed (the first half of the book), the priest is dead and the media is swarming like flies 

on manure, the police assign Jordan Becker, their most experienced detective, who also is just 

digging out from under an internal affairs investigation, to unravel this complex case. 

Taking down the killer and making sense of the God angle could just be Becker’s own chance 

at redemption in his own life and work.  There are sparse clues to speak of and what he finds 

upends each succeeding step. Every inch forward sends Becker back well past where he 

began. More than once, Becker begins to believe that he has met his match in this priest killer. 

As so often happens, when an investigation continues to fail, the only way to capture the killer 

is to get down in the sewer of darkness where such targets exist. 

Some premise, right? The author takes us on a roller coaster ride where good and evil exist in 

tandem. Is there a ‘winner’ here? Lessons to be learned? Characters that may be part of an 

ongoing series? 

Probably not, 

Despite the lack of a clear good guy/bad guy. There’s no black and white, only gray. Lots of 

gray.  But there is one clear winner: the reader who picks up this book.