This is a great month for Irish crime fiction, with more strong releases than one column can fit, including titles by Jane Casey, John Connolly and Catherine Ryan Howard.
In Jane Casey’s The Secret Room (Hemlock Press, £16.99), Maeve Kerrigan is reminded – as she has been multiple times in her policing career – that “monsters come in all shapes and sizes”, and the dual timelines here offer acts of villainy that are as shape-shifting as those who orchestrate them.
The action opens at a luxurious Mayfair hotel where the married Ilaria Cavendish collects a key to Room 412, as she does most Wednesdays. Her standing midweek tryst takes a turn when her distraught lover Sam Blundell exits their room almost immediately after entering: he claims Ilaria was already dead when he arrived, but the seemingly clear CCTV evidence leaves him the lone suspect for Kerrigan, Josh Derwent, and the rest of their team.
This murder investigation is interrupted when Josh becomes embroiled in a separate crime, one considerably closer to home. It will test his resolve, and Maeve’s, as personal complications abound, some long simmering and others more recent. Readers of the previous Kerrigan book will recall that it concluded with a surprising twist, which takes centre stage in this rich addition to the series. Casey’s characteristically light touch deftly keeps these elements aloft, the multiple domestic suspense plots and various police procedural elements enriching each other, as they do across all of her writing.
With The Children of Eve (Hodder & Stoughton, £22.00), John Connolly’s Charlie Parker returns for a 22nd novel in this astonishingly consistent series. Parker has always aged in nearly real time, and he’s feeling the years more here, in both spirit and body, wearying (as his girlfriend Macy observes) of martyring himself over and over: “I no longer had the energy to fight every battle on other people’s terms.”
The case seems straightforward when a local artist’s boyfriend disappears, but it soon tangles Parker in something much knottier. A fearsome drug lord, Urrea, has sent a fixer and an unnamed, unnerving woman to recover what’s been stolen from him. With more than a touch of the Gothic, this pair kill their way from Mexico to Maine, from one link in the chain of smugglers, collectors, and rivals to the next.
Brutal as this pair are, Connolly cannily gives them increasingly complex motivations. Amid all this, Parker’s daughters Sam and her long-dead sister Jennifer – together with another character who reappears unexpectedly – put a newly sharp edge on Parker’s long-standing relationship to the supernatural: something’s returned, they know, renewing questions about his very nature.
Connolly’s trademarks – the wit, the emotional and moral gravity, the sense of a dark, chaotic world just beneath ours – are here in force. It’s deeply satisfying to see these strengths sustained even in telling other stories along the way. Always generous in spirit, these novels are often as much about what’s happening around the margins as about the central plot. This is, as ever, terrific stuff.
Everybody is under pressure, keeping secrets and making assumptions in Catherine Ryan Howard’s Burn After Reading (Bantam, £16.99), particularly struggling novelist Emily Joyce. Five years earlier, Emily’s debut novel was a runaway bestseller for Morningstar Books, but since then she’s stalled out and failed to deliver her follow-up. Now, “every single morning her first thought upon waking was, today could be the day someone at Morningstar remembers me” and demands she return the £25,000 advance. Money long since spent, as her frequently overdrawn current account reminds her.
Emily’s worries are realised when Morningstar executives arrive in Dublin with an ultimatum: ghostwrite the memoir of public pariah Jack Smyth or return the advance. Seeing no way out, Emily signs on and heads to Florida to interview Jack, bound by a non-disclosure agreement.
Jack is facing pressure too: the Irish Olympian turned entrepreneur garnered national sympathy for trying to rescue his wife Kate from their burning home, only to fall under suspicion when the autopsy revealed she was dead before the fire began. The action spins between flashbacks to Kate’s life before the house fire and Emily’s tense week in a desolate Florida vacation home, where Jack uses their interview to present his side of the story. Little is as it seems, and Burn After Reading is another energetic Howard thriller, with tight pacing, an unusual setting and a strong narrator.
For most of its pages, Chris Offutt’s The Reluctant Sheriff (No Exit, £18.99), the fourth in his Mick Hardin series, runs in two distinct lanes: an eventful southern US noir and an international thriller with the deliberative pacing of a Le Carré, where (seemingly) much less happens. This may be more rewarding for those who’ve read the last Hardin title, Code of the Hills, but new readers will still find Mick’s company well worth keeping. Offutt’s vivid writing summons an impressively evocative sense of place and an equally strong ear for all the things his often-laconic characters aren’t saying aloud.
When the novel opens, Army vet Mick is reluctantly acting as Eldridge County sheriff while his sister – the elected sheriff – recovers from injuries sustained on duty. While navigating the county’s entangled personal histories – the connections, the secrets, the old wounds – Mick also has to figure out who’s behind a rapidly escalating body count. The case leads him into his own past, and some debts come due – with violent consequences – even as the rest of the narrative spreads to include Johnny Boy, an old friend in hiding on Corsica with a secretive friend of Hardin’s.
Offutt has built a world full of complex backstories, teased out through storytelling that should tempt a reader to go back to the beginning of the series and watch it all unfold.
Like her previous novel, the excellent Day One, Abigail Dean’s haunting The Death of Us (Hemlock, £16.99) is a devastatingly sad exploration of the grief, shame and trauma echoing out from a brutal crime. What happened, and who did it, is not long in doubt: the focus is instead on the mystery of how to keep living after the crime. In the summer of 2001, serial rapist Nigel Wood broke into a string of South London homes, eventually making his way to young couple Edward and Isabel Hennessy, assaulting Isabel for hours while keeping Edward in another room.
Evading capture for years, Wood himself is barely present, desiccated and dissipated at his 2021 sentencing, which Isabel and Edward attend, along with his other victims. Throughout the proceedings, Isabel – now a successful playwright and screenwriter – looks back, conveying the horror of what happened without exploiting the graphic; for her, “the violence seemed such a small segment of it, all these years later, though it was the part people usually wanted, the pulpy little heart”. Vividly drawn in her bone-dry wit and scathing self-awareness, she is a memorable guide to this novel’s undercurrents and shadowy corners.
This is deliberate, precise writing, at its most explosive in its quietest moments. As Edward’s and Isabel’s narratives circle around the years, Dean layers details to sustain dread and suspense, even though much of what’s happened is known nearly from the start. Nonetheless hauntingly surprising, The Death of Us is a powerfully told story.
