PHOTO CREDIT: TYPORAMA
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THE TWO BIRDS
HAL GLATZER
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ALL INFORMATION IN THIS POST IS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
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The Two Birds is the third mystery in the Friends with Benefits series, which includes The Nest and The Office Wife.
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February 3, 2026
Words & Pictures
Audio-Playwrights, in New York
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PRAISE FOR THE TWO BIRDS:
“Teddie and Herman are at it again. With all of their sleuthing and other activities, it's amazing that they even have time for a few hours together at their Nest!! This is a fantastic story with lots of excellent plot twists, fascinating characters, and fine tying-up of the entire mystery."-- Caryl Janis [Carol Binkowski]
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ABOUT THE TWO BIRDS:
Teddie (nicknamed “Ducky”) and Herman (“Drakey”) are friends with benefits, but they aren’t spending much time, lately, billing and cooing.
Teddie has been cast as Lady Macbeth in the local community theater troupe: and she and her husband George have to practice to stay competitive in their tennis club.
Herman has been drawn into pursuing a decades-old cold case: but his wife Sylvia needs his help fighting off a challenge to her professional life.
Teddie has been cast as Lady Macbeth in the local community theater troupe: and she and her husband George have to practice to stay competitive in their tennis club.
Herman has been drawn into pursuing a decades-old cold case: but his wife Sylvia needs his help fighting off a challenge to her professional life.
The spouses, who long ago gave up sex, are willing to tolerate the arrangement, as long as it doesn’t become public knowledge. But that’s a big risk, since Ducky and Drakey flown into mysteries before, uncovering murder and mayhem in Grand Lake City. Fortunately police homicide detective Sarah Larson has, by the summer of 2019, come to accept their help and to help them in return.
The cold case resolves around an urban legend that somewhere in the city there is a warehouse of vintage motorcycles that were stolen from the factory—still in their shipping crates—back in 1948. Felix Long, and aspiring writer, brings this story to Herman, who is a retired magazine editor, hoping that, together, they can write a book about it. That would mean locating the con man Don Reynolds who, in 1986, claimed to have found those stolen bikes. He sold them, then ran off with the money, never having produced any bike but the one he drove around town.
Sylvia’s need for Herman’s help is more pressing. She chairs the local college’s School of Forestry and runs its research lab about 100 miles away in the mountains.
The owners o the acreage just uphill from the lab are a 93-year-old man named Homer Gilly and a corporation called Harves Gold, LLC. They are asking the state’s Department of Land Management to issue a logging permit. At a public hearing, Gilly says he wants to sell the timber to give a nest-egg to his daughter Agns, who’s in her 70s.
Logging would wreak havoc on the forest land around the lab. To prioritize Sylvia’s dilemma, Herman sidelines Felix by introducing him to Irwin Duteriane, who has a local true-crime podcast; and to Shirley McKenzie, who writes a local true-crime blog.
Each of them promises to help Felix, but after a week, Irwin disappears; and two weeks later Shirley disappears too. So Herman feels he has to pick up the ball again.
Teddie is being whipsawed between the theater troupe’s more experienced leading ladies: Susie Warriner and Margo Boyd. Both are trying hard to be Teddie’s new best friend, even though each of them wanted—expected—to play Lady Macbeth herself, until Teddie came along. And her shoulder is giving her trouble, so she might not be able to compete in the tennis club’s upcoming tournament.
But what seems like separate threads are actually woven into a tapestry of deception, poison, and murder. If Ducky and Drakey try to unravel it, they could zero out their benefits and—if they don’t watch their backs—wind up dead.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Although the Friends with Benefits series takes place in the modern age, much of Hal Glatzer’s mystery fiction has been set in the past.
His Katy Green novels—Too Dead to Swing, A Fugue in Hell’s Kitchen, and The Last Full Measure—are set in musical milieux in the years just before World War II. And his illustrated bildungsroman, Dead In His Tracks, chronicles the rise and fall of a family-owned streetcar line.
In the 1970s, Glatzer worked as a reporter andbureau chief for newspapers and TV news stations; but in 1978 he began to cover the emerging high-tech industries of Silicon Valley. He contributed to and/or edited several “computer magazines” for general readers, and had three non-fiction books published about computers and telecommunications.
He debuted as a mystery novelist in 1986 with The Trapdoor, about a hacker who gets in trouble with organized crime. He is a longtime member of Sisters In Crime; and of Mystery Writers of America, currently serving as vice-president of MWA’s New York chapter.
Glatzer also writes Sherlock Holmes pastiches, set authentically in the Victorian and Edwardian era, whichhave been published in U.K. and U.S. anthologies, and reprinted in his own anthology: The Sign of Five. He is active in several “scion societies.” And every year, he produces a Sherlock Holmes play in New York, performed in old-time-radio style.
When he is not working as an author, he’s working as a musician, playing guitar and singing the “Great American Songbook” from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway.
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