Why do a million hummingbirds descend upon a certain Missouri lake every April 15th, killing one more resident than they did the year before?
Once a man with a seemingly limitless future, Lake Tanaka resident Dr. Kevin Cousey struggles to find a purpose in life after a prankster mangled his hand with an M-80 twenty years ago, costing him his career, his family, and very nearly his life. He thinks he has found it in the lethal hummingbird attacks that occur at the lake every year, as well as an ally in small-town newspaper editor Paul Mahr, the only other person who sees a pattern and seeks to connect the pieces of the mystery that haunts the lake.
These pieces include a thirteen-year-old French exchange student with a passion for hummingbirds, the Navy diver–turned–corporate millionaire with the mysterious past she was staying with at the time of her disappearance, and the patron saint of birds.
The Death Tax
is a cross between Hitchcock's
The Birds
(with a purpose, no less), Nabokov's
Lolita
in its darkest incarnation, and a murder mystery, tackling such thorny issues as pedophilia, social apathy and intolerance, and religious hypocrisy along the way. Likewise, it is a celebration of nature—from its assuming the mantle of vengeance where man has failed to all the subtle nuances of light and atmosphere that occur on the water and in the sky between the twin glories of sunrise and sunset: no less than an ode to Steinbeck's loving descriptions of the Salinas Valley.
is at once nasty, unflinching, unlikely, and beautiful. Just as Hitchcock's
Psycho
forever changed the way people think about showers, and Dickey's
Deliverance
forever changed the way people think about canoes,
will forever change the way people think about hummingbirds.