A MURMURATION OF STARLINGS

On a summer’s day in 2009 teenager Neyra Alarcon de Alba walks home with friends in the Mexican town of Magdalena de Kino. Neyra Alarcon will not be seen alive again. Her remains are found in the desert of New Mexico—hers and the butchered remains of several others.

Seven years later, the body of young woman, mutilated, raped, unidentifiable, is found in a Brooklyn New York warehouse. She is not the first victim. She will not be the last.

Finding only questions, the NYPD Detectives on the case and the FBI field officer brought in to oversee it reluctantly turn to a former FBI agent trained in Native American tracking techniques, the techniques of a little known Federal investigative unit, the Shadow Wolves.

That former agent is Ryker Chase, the same agent involved in the investigation of Neyra Alarcon seven years earlier. That was an investigation that cost both his partner’s and a Shadow Wolf Agent’s lives, and nearly his own. Then the two murderers were found and killed in the New Mexican desert. But the evil within them did not die and has now found its way to New York. The only one who can confront it, the only one who can once again recognize its face, is Chase.

‘A Murmuration of Starlings’ is a complex, post-modernist novel exploring image, identity and human duality, a noir mystery in the style of Jim Thompson with a nod to Cormac McCarthy, in which landscape itself is character and the darkness out there may be the darkness within Chase himself.