Parrot Blues: A Neil Hamel Mystery

Neil Hamel, the brisk Albuquerque attorney with a distinctly Southwestern spiritual side, makes her sixth appearance, after The Lies That Bind, in this clever, winning tale. Parrots mate for life, which is more than Hamel's client has done: Terrance Lewellan, a portly corporate raider who sports a testosterone patch, is about to divorce Deborah Dumaine, his flamboyant stiletto-heeled wife, who is a renowned anthropologist. But Dumaine is now missing, along with Perigee, the better half of a pair of rare indigo macaws the couple own. It's the one with the beak Terrance wants recovered, and he points Neil toward a sleazy parrot smuggler named Wes Brown, whom he thinks has kidnapped them both. Traveling to the desert to make a ransom drop, Neil wonders whether her client, who refuses to call in the authorities, is involved in his wife's disappearance. Her concerns set up intriguing tensions, but the parrots steal this show, rendering Albuquerque and its human inhabitants pale in comparison. Hamel's Native American spiritualism may be overdone, but it is tempered by her appealingly wry observations as she reflects upon life's plain brown birds and their responses to their more gaudily hued cousins. Author tour. (Mar.)