The Hummingbirds

In the prologue of McMeekin’s lackluster debut, groundskeeper Ezra Fog is pistol-whipped by an unidentified man and dumped into the Pacific. Flash back nine days. Ezra is employed by influential Hollywood actor Sybil Harper and her producer husband, Grant Hudson. Ezra’s work routine allows him the freedom to nurture his fascination with hummingbirds, and he spends as much time as possible trying to catch their beauty on film. His comfortable, quiet existence is rocked when Sybil, whose eyes are not “the massive, prepubescent globes of so many other actors, but bright blue shiners carefully guarded by her lids,” starts to come on to him. Ezra is overcome by desire for her, and their interactions become more complex after Grant offers him money to take pictures of the license plates of the cars of any men who visit his wife while he’s not at home. Despite a backstory involving Ezra’s troubled mother, who believed that the apocalypse was imminent, he and the other characters come across as two-dimensional. McMeekin adds nothing new to familiar noir tropes. (Feb.)