In this first novel by a medical correspondent and columnist, a poison that chemically disintegrates itself is part of the mystery surrounding the death of hundreds of blackbirds in the hills around Dartmouth College. Professor Wilson Bledsoe has not only discovered it but is researching its cause. When he's blatantly kidnapped one night on his way home, the stakes become suspicious and dangerous.

In obvious agitation, his wife Kay contacts her husband's brother Sterling, putting the fact that he's an FBI agent ahead of the one about them not speaking much to one another over the years. When Wilson's dead body is discovered, Sterling Bledsoe, once a supervisory special agent at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico, Virginia, pleads with his superiors to be lead investigator on the case.

When Sterling sees his brother's body with a racial epithet carved into his chest, he realizes that it might not represent what it was intended to. False leads and frameups follow him as his investigation leads to Wilson's associates on the faculty, to the president of the college, Wallace Mortimer III, to an Indian mystic, to fellow FBI agents who love and hate him, and to a beautiful student who seems to be involved with all the major figures involved in some way with the bird deaths.

As Bledsoe follows his leads, and as bodies pile up, he wrestles with his feelings about the attainments and character of his illustrious, dead brother. Discovering so much about the sibling he mostly rejected in his adult life helps and hinders dealing with feelings of inadequacy and being always overshadowed by an over-achieving, parent-favored brother.

But someone's getting uncomfortable with the progress he's making on the case and, with the use of a doctored photo from a security camera, makes him a suspect, turning him into a man on the run and in increasing danger for his own life.

It's an essentially quite well written piece, with some twists, the dimension of psychological introspection, and a colorful set of characters. I had the feeling, though, of a story overstretched and plodding at times with a central mystery that's not as unpredictable as the length of the pursuit suggests that it is.