In Saskatoon, Canada, a newly graduated veterinarian shoots wildly at a horse in the clinic of the veterinary college. A few miles away, in the middle of a frozen slough, veterinarians find the frozen body of a butcher, cradling a cow's head. Nearby, a successful cattle embryo transfer farm has something to hide. Veterinarian Abner Dueck, back in Canada after being expelled from Indonesia, once again finds himself trying to solve problems which the people around him think are none of his business.

Fear of Landing, the first Abner Dueck mystery, was listed by Publishers Weekly as one of the top 10 mysteries and top 100 books of 2008. Margaret Cannon wrote, in The Globe and Mail that "David Waltner-Toews is a genuine polymath. He's a published poet, author of books on subjects as diverse as Mennonite history and exotic animal-to-human diseases. He's a professor of population medicine at the University of Guelph, an epidemiologist, a founder of Veterinarians Without Borders and the Network for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health. In his free time, he's written his first mystery novel, and it's terrific."