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Birds of Prey Don’t Sing follows a gifted and deeply broken assassin who takes on the hardest case of his career, murdering a priest and making it look like divine judgment. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I set out to write the most unique assassin thriller that I could, and to do so I focused on M.O. and backstory. Michael Harrier’s clients choose two targets—one to kill, and one to frame for the murder. Once that elusive M.O. was set, I created several dual-target jobs, some inspired by real events, others distilled from my imagination. Because this was the first book in the series, I felt I should go big, with the hit that seems impossible, but ends up being plausible. And that job was informed by a serendipitous bit of then-unrelated research I happened upon in the early stages—that’s when the spark became flame.
Michael is both sympathetic and terrifying. How did you balance those sides, and how important was trauma in shaping his worldview and actions?
I balanced that by trying to make him human first. And yes, trauma was key to his backstory. Pretty much every assassin in the genre is ex-government (CIA, Mossad, MI6, etc) or ex-military, and for good reason, but I wanted to break from that tradition. So to me, a key part of a self-made assassin, without resorting to a stereotypical sociopath (who would be difficult to sympathize with), is their upbringing, which needed to involve trauma and pain. A wounded human forged in trauma as opposed to a natural born killer; more nurture than nature. And I’ve long been fascinated by how trauma can both inform and misinform our intuition, judgment, and decisions, and I liked how this paradox played out for Michael as his story unspooled.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Justice, morality, trauma, intuition, redemption, and human connection.
Do you see Michael’s story continuing in future books?
Yes. I have more ideas than time, but book two is underway.
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Michael Harrier has built his reputation on a system no one else uses. Every contract comes with two targets. One dies. Someone else takes the blame.
It’s worked flawlessly for years.
Until now.
What should be a clean hit starts to unravel. A woman with a violent past pulls him off course. A single mistake threatens to expose everything. And for the first time, Harrier is forced to improvise.
Meanwhile, LAPD homicide sergeant Jordan Becker is hunting a killer he can’t pin down.
But he’s built his career on getting results where others stall out.
The case doesn’t follow any rules. The evidence doesn’t hold. The story keeps shifting. And the deeper Becker digs, the clearer it becomes he’s chasing someone smarter, faster, and always just out of reach.
As Harrier’s world tightens and Becker starts to break through, both men are pulled into a game where every move has consequences—and no one is as untouchable as they think.
Because this time, getting away with murder isn’t the hardest part.
It’s controlling what comes next.
Birds of Prey Don’t Sing
Birds of Prey Don’t Sing follows Michael Harrier, a gifted and deeply broken assassin who was forged in childhood abuse and teenage bloodshed. We see him as a sixteen-year-old rifle prodigy hunting poachers in a burning Central African park, as a young man pulled back from a brutal suicide attempt in Los Angeles, and as a 2003 contract killer who chooses who deserves to die and who gets framed. The story jumps between these points in time as Michael, now working under the name Atropos, balances jobs for gangsters and power brokers with a twisted personal code that says he is there to protect victims and punish predators. Therapy tapes, old case files, and violent present-day set pieces all circle the same questions about guilt, justice, and whether a man built on rage can ever be anything else.
The prose feels physical. Author Joe Cary leans into concrete detail and rhythm. Fights read like choreography in tight, clear beats, not like a blur of action movie noise. I liked how the narration slips in and out of Michael’s head, with short, sharp questions and little self-directed jabs that show how much he hates himself and still needs control. Sometimes the sentences get dense, with long stacks of images and technical bits about guns, bikes, or anatomy, and that can slow things down. Most of the time though, the style rides a nice line between gritty and thoughtful, with a dark sense of humor that kept me hooked even when the violence got gnarly.
What really stuck with me were the ideas under all the blood. The book is obsessed with self-righteousness, suicide, and this urge to “be the justice” when the world looks rotten. Michael’s need to punish abusers comes from a real place, from watching his neo-Nazi father murder his mother and from feeling like a cowardly kid who did not step in. The sessions with Dr. Collins, the tapes about “counteraction” and the “Batman complex,” and the way Michael clings to Atropos as a kind of sacred role all make his violence feel both awful and heartbreakingly logical. I found myself rooting for him and then feeling uneasy about that, which I think is the point. The book pokes at vigilantism, at trauma as fuel, at how easy it is to recast vengeance as virtue when you pick the right targets. It also brushes against race, gangs, and class in LA in a way that feels lived in, even if it sometimes skims past big social questions to stay tight on Michael’s psyche.
I would recommend Birds of Prey Don’t Sing to readers who like morally messy thrillers and character-driven assassin stories, not to anyone looking for something light. If you enjoy books where the hero is dangerous and competent and also one bad night away from breaking, this will be right in your lane. Fans of gritty crime fiction, realistic fight writing, and psychological depth around trauma and self-harm will find a lot here to chew on. Birds of Prey Don’t Sing is a dark, intense ride that I heartily enjoyed.
Pages: 415 | ISBN : 9798993804620
