"Those gleaming creatures, above all that misery and cruelty, were a vision that gave me courage." It is an unusual premise, a thriller that follows the migration of the stork, east through Europe, across the Balkans, through Israel, and then south west across Africa. Grange"s narrator Louis Antioch, is a bored academic and amateur ornithologist. As the storks, and their trustees, a network of bird enthusiasts, begin to disappear in mysterious and grisly circumstances, Max Bohm, chief stork guardian, hires Louis to investigate. Shortly afterwards we learn of Bohm"s own bloody death in a stork"s nest. Originally published in France during 1994, the novel examines the political landscape of the time. Antioch and the storks traverse a world racked with the insecurities about burgeoning nationalism which sprang up following the collapse of the Soviet sphere of influence. The implication of the storks disappearance is that evil is at work and that the hope created by the collapse of the old world order is under threat.Grange has a rich feel for the landscape and culture of the nations in which the novel is set, and Ian Monk does a fine job in translating the prose. It is, however a pity that the character of Louis Antioch isn"t better developed. He is an emotionally cold man, numbed by childhood traumas which are slowly revealed as the novel progresses. However, his reactions to the events that surround him seem at times clichéd and shallow, at odds with the narrative tone. Iain Robinson