The Naming of the Birds

By: Paraic O'Donnell

Narrated by: Charles Armstrong

'Some wrong was done long ago. It can never be righted, and it has not been forgotten. Someone remembers it.'

London, 1894. Inspector Henry Cutter is in an unconvivial temper.

Then the murders begin. The first to die is Sir Aneurin Considine, a decorated but long-retired civil servant, is found dead amongst his beloved orchid collection, killed by a wound inflicted with surgical precision.

Soon, other victims suffer similar fates. More men in powerful positions; more murders that are gruesome but immaculately orchestrated. The perpetrator comes and goes like a ghost, leaving only carefully considered traces.

Hot on the tails of this invisible adversary are Inspector Cutter, along with his hapless but endlessly enthusiastic sidekick, Sergeant Gideon Bliss.

But as the pressure mounts, victims will start to look like perpetrators, murderers like truth-tellers, long-hidden failings will come resurface, and not even their very selves are safe from suspicion.©2025 Paraic O’Donnell

Critic reviews

The Naming of the Birds is something very special: meaty, dark, exuberant, full of complicated people doing difficult things in terrible circumstances, and gesturing mutely towards love. I recommend it to both those who love Victorian Gothic, and those who usually run a mile from anything described as that but enjoy having their preconceptions confounded (Jon McGregor)

The intrigue of a Conan Doyle, the terror of a Poe and the wit of an Oscar Wilde, all wrapped up in a delicious Victorian detective drama (Mat Osman)

Splendid. Brimming with energy, the plot unfolds at a cracking pace. From the unsettling opening scenes to the dizzying acrobatics of the climax, Paraic O'Donnell tells his tale with the same exuberance displayed by his murderer who separates bodies from souls with a quite devastating flair (Diane Setterfield)

A companion to Paraic O'Donnell's 2018 gothic mystery The House on Vesper Sands, The Naming of the Birds unfolds with rising tension and expert pacing . . . O'Donnell's virtuosic style, a mashup of Henry James and Frankie Boyle, is worth the admission price alone

A stylish historical thriller from a writer of brio and wit

Brilliantly compelling . . . The period detail is perfectly evoked, the dialogue crackling with wit

The return of the deliciously irascible Inspector Henry Cutter, star turn of The House on Vesper Sands

I immensely enjoyed Paraic O'Donnell's The Naming of the Birds, which plunges the audience into smelly, noisy late nineteenth-century London in the company of the redoubtable Inspector Cutter and somewhat less bluff sergeant Gideon Bliss

This Victorian mystery novel is Dickens meets Sherlock Holmes meets La Femme Nikita, and it wears its genre conventions proudly. The heroes: a brilliant, gruff police officer and his bumbling assistant, aided by a plucky lady journalist. The crimes: elaborate serial murders of insignificant elderly men. The killings are connected to the book's prologue, a harrowing tale of mistreated orphans seemingly in training to be assassins. The reader knows this, but the detectives do not, giving the events a frisson of dramatic irony as the body count ticks up