Prologue

      Detective Inspector Richard Poole sat on the verandah of his beachside shack looking up at the cloudless Caribbean sky in inarticulate outrage.

      A passing parrot had just crapped in his cup of tea.

      It didn’t seem possible, but Richard had watched the little bugger fly in over the sea and defecate in mid-air, the little ball of released guano flying in a perfect parabola only to land in his English Breakfast Tea with an accuracy, Richard realised, that Barnes Wallis could only have dreamed of.

      In a spasm of disgust, Richard sloshed the contents of his china cup over the balustrade and tried to return his attention to the book he’d been reading. It was an old hardback he’d found at the back of the police station called A Field Guide to the Insects of the Caribbean, and he’d been fascinated by what he’d so far been able to learn from it. For example, he’d had no idea that the brightest bioluminescent insect in the world wasn’t in fact the firefly, but was a species of click beetle that lived in the Caribbean called the Fire Beetle.

      But it was no good, Richard couldn’t settle back into his book, and instead he found himself glancing nervously back up at the sky every few seconds. After all, what if another parrot came for him out of the sun? Richard sighed heavily to himself. Honestly, when you got down to it, the Caribbean was a bloody nightmare from start to finish.

      It didn’t help that he had already been in a bad mood that morning, even before the aerial bombardment. This was because Richard had a secret. A deep and dark secret he’d not even dared mention to his team yet. In fact, as he went through to the little galley kitchen at the back of his shack to wash up his tea things, Richard decided that there surely couldn’t