RAY RING – Peregrine Dream. Henry Dyer #2. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1990. No paperback edition.

   What Henry Dyer is, when it comes down to it, is your basic open range environmentalist PI. He lives in Tucson, formerly worked for the Arizona Department of Game and Fish, and this, his second adventure, centers around a pair of kidnapped falcons — and murder. (There is apparently a thriving black market in rare animals, especially those of an endangered species.)

   The story is not all that complicated, merely cluttered. Lots of characters, including Dyer’s former girl friend. She is about to get married to someone else, but she is still deeply involved in Dyer’s life. There are also some fairly ugly villains and lots of intense action. Solving the mystery sometimes comes in second best.

— Reprinted from Mystery*File #23,, July 1990. (slightly restructured and revised).


Bibliographic Notes:   The first Henry Dyer novel was Telluride Smile (1988). There was not to be another, but Ray Ring, a noted award-winning journalist, did write a very noirish third crime novel called Arizona Kiss (1991).