The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love

Holton, who has earned LJ Best Book and Best Audiobook lauds, begins a new series involving academics. (Her previous series, “Dangerous Damsels,” focused on witches, pirates, and spies.) Set in a fantasy Victorian England, book one centers on a hotly contested academic fight by ornithologists to nab the highly endangered caladrius bird. The one-sided enemies-to-lovers plot sees rival birders and professors Beth Pickering and Devon Lockley stranded in each other’s company as they are caught in a web of schemes and competitors up and down the length of England, all in pursuit of the caladrius. Narrator Elizabeth Knowelden is in top form reading Holton’s book, hitting every pun, pausing at just the right moment to key listeners in to the jokes, delivering the dialogue in such as way to make the attraction between Beth and Devon something both frothy and simmering, and conveying the rambunctious plot with spot-on rhythm. It all adds up to an experience of sheer romantic glee.