The Bird Yard: A Novel - Hardcover

Martin, Julia Wallis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312205007 ISBN 13: 9780312205003

Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur, 1999

Synopsis

When 12-year-old Joseph Coyne is missing and is assumed to have been abducted, Detective Parker makes a promise to the boy's mother: We'll get him back, alive. It proves to be a promise that Parker cannot keep. When another young boy is missing under similar circumstances, the evidence leads Parker to an aviary or bird yard attached to an abandoned house. While the finches imprisoned in the aviary exert a magical appeal to the young boys who surreptitiously come to watch them, its owner is a shadowy figure whose hold over his young visitors seems far more sinister. Convinced that the killer is stalking his third victim, a child Parker knows, he enlists the help of a child psychologist to unravel a dark secret.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"Well constructed, beautifully written. It will definitely rank among the best crime books of the year." - Yorkshire Post

"A nail-biting thriller...a remarkably mature novel." - Val McDermid, Manchester Evening News

"Immaculately crafted, chilling and...compulsively readable." - Cambridge Evening News

"This author's career [is] going much the same way as [Minette] Walters'." - The Bookseller

From the Author:

Thanks for showing an interest in this book. It started out as a screenplay but I wrote it as a novel after Hodder & Stoughton published 'A Likeness in Stone' and asked me for an outline of my next novel. I was so steeped in the screenplay which, at the time, was called 'Roly's Yard', that I couldn't focus on anything else, so I really had no option but to write it as a novel. Besides, the subject matter was deemed too disturbing for mainstream tv and I was beginning to think it would never be made. Therefore, the decision was made for me in a way.

Even so, it was a rocky ride. No sooner had I finished the novel that my agent got a call from my editor at Hodder to say that the company wouldn't be publishing anything that touched on paedophilia, and that included my novel 'for which they'd paid an advance but had yet to see a draft'. My agent told them the novel was finished, and the least they could do was read it, which they did. Once they were assured that there was nothing graphically violent in the novel, and that the reader didn't actually 'see' what had happened to the children but that this was left to the reader's imagination, they published it, but not without reservations.

I'm relieved to say the novel was well-received by reviewers and public alike, and I hope you enjoy it. Email me (I'm not allowed to give you my website address or email here but you'll find my website on most search engines) and good or bad - let me know what you thought of it. All the best, Julia

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0312205007
• ISBN 13: 9780312205003
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288