Peregrine
by William Bayer
Summary
Above the Rockefeller Center skating rink, a peregrine falcon, the fastest animal alive, stoops from the sky at her falconer's signal and kills a young skater, talons to the throat, while a tourist's camera turns. The city does what the novel's falconer knew it would, converts the horror instantly into content, and Pam Barrett, the ambitious newswoman who witnessed the strike, rides the story from affiliate desk to national attention, becoming the murderer's chosen correspondent without knowing it.
Bayer's killer is the book's black invention: a falconer of genuine brilliance whose identification with his bird has crossed into something priestly, who has trained the peregrine to take human prey, and who begins courting Pam through the medium he has selected for his masterpiece, terror as broadcast event. The novel runs its two hunts in parallel, the falconer escalating, strike by strike, toward a design only he can see, and Frank Janek, an NYPD detective of the reflective, damaged school, assembling the case from talon wounds, falconry suppliers and the psychology of a man who would rather be a raptor. Between them stands the media machine, which the book, written by a filmmaker, anatomises with insider coldness: the ratings meetings, the ethics traded scene by scene, Pam's complicity dawning slower than her ambition.
The finale pits hunter against hunter as two peregrines fight above Central Park, and pays off both the thriller and the argument.
Around two hundred and forty pages.
Best for readers who want the high concept serial killer novel before the genre industrialised, with the media critique built in and a genuinely original murder weapon overhead.
Historical Context & Significance
Peregrine won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1982, and its detective outlived its falcon: Frank Janek returned in Switch, whose premise, two victims' severed heads exchanged, sold to television and became the Richard Crenna telefilm franchise that ran for years, making Janek one of the era's screen detectives while the founding novel stayed a paperback cult.
William Bayer came to fiction from filmmaking and mystery writing stock, his parents having published four novels of their own under a joint pen name while his mother, Eleanor Perry, wrote for the screen, and his thrillers kept the camera's habits, surveillance, framing, the image as evidence, Peregrine's media apparatus being the personal signature on a Hitchcock premise.
The Edgar committee's choice of it over the year's establishment names kept the award's tradition of backing the audacious machine, and the falconer's method, murder by trained bird, has stayed the novel's calling card.