Ornithologist's Field Guide to Love

Beth Pickering holds an ornithology professorship at Oxford, and Devon Lockley holds the matching post at Cambridge. Each has spent years treating the other as a professional irritant.

A national competition now offers tenure and a five thousand pound prize for whoever captures the caladrius. The bird is believed nearly extinct and said to heal the sick, and Beth and Devon end up hunting the very same one.

Their story opens Love's Academic, the first of three planned novels. It plays academic rivalry for comedy against a historical fantasy backdrop, an alternate Victorian England laced with small magic. Here a woman can hold an Oxford chair without anyone remarking on it.

Sabotage from rival competitors and the caladrius's own evasiveness keep forcing the two together, and reluctant teamwork slides into something else. The tone stays light and comic, built on banter over stolen field notes rather than real danger, and the couple's mutual attraction is never seriously in question.