Private investigator and spy shop owner Xena Cali is back to find the answers when the most popular bird guide, Forrest, in Galveston, Texas is killed. Young honeymooners found his body kayaking around a nearby island, and “The Pelican Man” Ned Quinn hired Xena and her team to look into it.

Ned is not only the head of the local birding association that the deceased had worked for, he also wrote a column for the local paper where he did autopsies on dead pelicans and printed the results. Whether the bird was killed by plastic, by poison, or by poachers, Ned uses his expertise to bring attention to the problems facing the local bird life. But now it’s the humans who are in danger.

Xena and her crack team go to work, setting up surveillance cameras and going undercover to try to root out who killed the Forrest and why. But the more they learn about the local birding community, the less they know who to trust. Was it his wife, or his girlfriend? Could it have been someone else in the birding community, someone jealous of his popularity? Or is someone trying to bring the whole bird association down?

Xena has to race against time, as the year’s big fundraiser for the bird association gets closer and closer. If they can’t solve Forrest’s murder in time, no one will contribute to the cause, and the local bird tours and preservation efforts will go unfunded. It will take creativity, hard work, and all the tech skills at Xena’s team’s fingertips to find the killer and protect the birding community in Galveston.

Dead Pelican, the latest in Lisa Haneberg’s series that started with Toxic Octopus, is a cozy like none other. Haneberg shies away from the G-rated sitting room cozies that so many writers offer to bring us a main character who is sassy, nontraditional, smart, not afraid to throw around a curse word or two, skilled in parkour, not afraid of a challenge, and possibly being stalked by someone from her original big sting operation back when she worked for corporate America. Dead Pelican is a fun ride, a roller coaster of clues and red herrings, and a truly imaginative ride of a mystery. Lots of fun, with fascinating characters to boot!

Galleys of Dead Pelican were provided for me, with many thanks.