Declan Burke

The latest Irish Times crime fiction column appeared last week, and included the new titles from Martin Cruz Smith, Chris Pavone, Natalie Haynes, Tom Rob Smith and Karen Perry. The Karen Perry review ran a lot like this:

Karen Perry is a new writing partnership composed of Karen Gillece and Paul Perry, and their debut The Boy That Never Was (Penguin / Michael Joseph, €14.99) suggests that it will be the first of many. A prologue set in Tangier in 2005 tells the reader that Harry is guilty of negligence in the death, during an earthquake, of his young son Dillon. The story then moves on to Dublin in 2010, when Harry believes he sees his missing son on O’Connell Street during an anti-government demonstration. Unable to persuade the Gardai that Dillon is alive and well, Harry confesses all to his wife, Robin, which is when we start to realise that Harry has a history of obsession and instability, and that Robin also has secrets she needs to conceal. The unreliable narrator is a staple of the crime / mystery genre, but The Boy That Never Was folds another dimension into the convention by offering us a pair of devious narrators. It’s a neat trick, especially as each succeeding account casts doubt on the truth of the previous offering’s events and the mental state of its narrator, with the result that this assured debut is equal parts thriller, mystery and fascinating psychological study. ~ Declan Burke

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Karen Perry – aka Karen Gillece and Paul Perry – had a short story published in the Irish Times this week, titled – ominously – ‘Tell Me Something About Your Wife’. You’ll find it here …
  Meanwhile, the fourth Karen Perry psychological thriller, CAN YOU KEEP A SECRET? (Penguin), will be published next month. Quoth the blurb elves:

It’s been twenty years since Lindsey has seen her best friend Rachel
  Twenty years since she has set foot in Thornbury Hall – the now crumbling home of the Bagenal family – where they spent so much time as teenagers. Since Patrick Bagenal’s 18th birthday party, the night everything changed.
  It’s time for a reunion
  Patrick has decided on one last hurrah before closing the doors of his family home for good. All of the old crowd, back together for a weekend.
  For the secrets to come out
  It’s not long before secrets begin to float to the surface. Everything that Lindsey shared with her best friend at sixteen and everything that she didn’t.
  But some secrets should never be told. They need to be taken to the grave. While others require revenge at any cost.

  CAN YOU KEEP A SECRET? will be published on August 26th. Karen Perry will be taking part in the ‘Dead in Dun Laoghaire’ crime fiction event on July 22nd. For a review of ONLY WE KNOW, clickety click here …

Hauled off the streets to safety during a terrorist attack on a London street as Karen Perry’s Your Closest Friend opens, radio producer Cara shares her most intimate secrets with her rescuer, Amy. When Amy, a young American woman, begins to worm her way into Cara’s life in the aftermath, Cara’s life begins to unravel in spectacular fashion. Previously the writing partnership of Karen Gillece and Paul Perry, ‘Karen Perry’ is now Gillece working alone, but the quality of the Karen Perry psychological thrillers remains undiminished. Your Closest Friend (Penguin Ireland) owes a considerable debt to Patricia Highsmith, being something of a blend of The Talented Mr Ripley and Strangers on a Train, the tension ramping up as Cara and Amy narrate alternate chapters, the former tangled up in a cat’s-cradle of infidelity and deceit, the latter a lesbian sociopath who hears voices in her head. Some of the twists in the latter stages strain credulity, but readers who enjoy being wrong-footed by labyrinthine plotting will savour this to the very last page. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times, along with reviews of new titles by Val McDermid, Megan Abbott, Tod Goldberg and Richard Anderson.

Composed of Karen Gillece and Paul Perry, the crime-writing duo Karen Perry publish their fourth offering, the psychological thriller CAN YOU KEEP A SECRET? (Penguin), this week. Quoth the blurb elves:

It’s been twenty years since Lindsey has seen her best friend Rachel
  Twenty years since she has set foot in Thornbury Hall – the now crumbling home of the Bagenal family – where they spent so much time as teenagers. Since Patrick Bagenal’s 18th birthday party, the night everything changed.
  It’s time for a reunion
  Patrick has decided on one last hurrah before closing the doors of his family home for good. All of the old crowd, back together for a weekend.
  For the secrets to come out
  It’s not long before secrets begin to float to the surface. Everything that Lindsey shared with her best friend at sixteen and everything that she didn’t.
  But some secrets should never be told. They need to be taken to the grave. While others require revenge at any cost.

  For a review of Karen Perry’s ONLY WE KNOW, clickety click here …
  For a short story from Karen Perry – ‘Tell Me Something About Your Wife’ – clickety-click here …

The second offering from the Irish writing partnership of Karen Perry (aka Karen Gillece and Paul Perry), Only We Know (Penguin) opens on a riverbank in Kenya’s Masai Mara in 1982, with Sally arriving moments too late to prevent a tragedy that involves her young sons Luke and Nicky and their friend Katie. The story then moves forward to 2013, when Katie is a journalist in Dublin, Luke a successful businessman, and Nicky a recently married musician living in Nairobi. The trio’s belief that their tragic secret is known only to them is revealed to be a fallacy when Katie receives a bizarre and ominous token in the post, and soon their lives are spiralling out of control as this psychological thriller, which offers alternating viewpoints and subjective interpretations of the truth of what really happened on that fateful day, strips back the layers of deceit that has sustained them in the intervening decades. Only We Know builds handsomely on the promise of The Boy That Never Was (2014), plausibly and hauntingly exploring the extent to which guilt, shame and secrecy can shape, define and eventually destroy lives. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

I’ve always been very fond of the Hodges Figgis bookstore on Dublin’s Dawson Street, which is currently hosting its own book festival (it runs from September 10th to 19th). The event that caught my eye, and which I’m hoping to get to, is the crime fiction night on Thursday 17th, when John Connolly will host a conversation between some of the most impressive talents of the new wave of Irish crime fiction, said talents being Karen Perry, Jane Casey, Alex Barclay, Liz Nugent and Sinead Crowley.
  It won’t have escaped your notice that, with the exception of the Paul Perry half of the ‘Karen Perry’ writing partnership, all those writers are women. Whether by accident or design, the Hodges Figgis event is certainly a timely one in that it celebrates the fact that female writers are very much to the fore in Irish crime writing these days. There have always been terrific women writers in terms of Irish crime fiction, among them Julie Parsons, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Ingrid Black, Cora Harrison, Erin Hart, Tana French, Niamh O’Connor and Arlene Hunt, but in the last couple of years women have come to dominate the scene, not least in terms of winning the crime fiction prize at the Irish Book Awards (Louise Phillips and Liz Nugent have won the last two awards); and this year alone we’ve seen debuts from Andrea Carter, Jax Miller, Sheena Lambert, Anna Sweeney and Kelly Creighton.
  I don’t have any theory as to why this might be the case (“Wot!?” I hear you gasp – “No theory?”), but if there is any underlying reason(s) for the trend, there’s no better man than John Connolly to winkle it/them out. The event takes place at Hodges Figgis, Dawson Street, Dublin 2, on Thursday 17th September, at 6.30pm. The event is free, and no booking is required.

’Tis the season to be jolly, the herald angels sing, deck the halls with boughs of frankincense and myrrh, tra-la-la-la, etc. Ho yes! It’s that time of year again, when we check our lists (twice) and decide which books have been naughty or nice over the previous twelve months. My choice of the nice ones, in the order I read them, runs thusly:

Blue is the Night, Eoin McNamee
Blue is the Night is the final novel in a loose trilogy that began in 2001 with The Blue Tango (which was longlisted for the Booker Prize) and continued with Orchid Blue in 2010. The trilogy is woven around Sir Lancelot Curran, whose career took him from lawyer to judge and on to Attorney General and Member of Parliament, but Blue is the Night investigates the brutal murder of Curran’s daughter, Patricia, outside their home in Whiteabbey in 1952. It focuses on Lance Curran’s wife, Doris, and his right-hand man and political fixer, Harry Ferguson. The book is by no means a straightforward crime fiction investigation, however: on one level the novel is about the timelessness of evil and how it reappears in different guises in all cultures throughout history. McNamee refers to the ‘ancient malice’ represented by the mummy Takabuti that Ferguson sees in a Belfast museum, and the novel also stretches back in time to late Victorian London, and Jack the Ripper. It’s a superb novel in its own right, but also a terrific conclusion to the ‘Blue trilogy’, in which McNamee explores the concept of noir as being a kind of Calvinist idea of pre-determination – that what happens to you is destined to happen, that there’s a hand on the scales and all you can do is rage against it.

The Missing File, DA Mishani
Set in the small Israeli city of Holon on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, D.A. Mishani’s debut The Missing File begins with the mother of a young boy reporting his disappearance to Inspector Avraham Avraham. Perplexed but initially unconcerned – children are never kidnapped or killed in Israel, Avraham tells us – the inspector only belatedly swings into action, by which time the reader has already encountered the boy’s sinister neighbour, Ze’ev, an English teacher and frustrated author who craves the inspiration that will spark his writing to life. D.A. Mishani is a crime writer and scholar in his native Israel, and here he blends a subversive take on the standard police procedural with ruminations on the crime novel itself, cross-referencing the work of Agatha Christie and Stieg Larsson with that of Kafka and Dostoevsky, and advancing Avraham’s theory as to why there are no detective novels in Hebrew. The well-meaning but hapless Avraham is a delightful creation, particularly as Steven Cohen’s translation is strewn with Avraham’s humorously morose observations on the human condition. With its finely crafted plot constantly confounding expectations, The Missing File marks D.A Mishani out as a writer to watch.

Unravelling Oliver, Liz Nugent
Liz Nugent’s Unravelling Oliver opens with Dublin-based writer Oliver Ryan viciously beating his wife Alice. The assault is described in the first person by Oliver himself, but Oliver’s is only one of a number of first-person accounts on offer here, each one a piece of the jigsaw that gradually assembles itself into portrait of a pathetic young boy who grew up to become a monster who writes best-selling children’s books. The reader is given no framing device relating to who might have collated the various accounts, or why, but the narrative gambit pays off handsomely. Oliver Ryan may be a vain, shallow and ultimately violent sociopath, but his story grows more compelling and nuanced the more we learn about him and the factors that influenced the man he would become, some of which were set in train even before he was born. More an investigation into psychology than a conventional crime thriller, Unravelling Oliver is a formidable debut and a deserved winner of this year’s crime fiction gong at the Irish Book Awards.

The Black Eyed Blonde, Benjamin Black
Benjamin Black (aka John Banville) resurrects Philip Marlowe again in The Black-Eyed Blonde, a novel that finds Marlowe still trying to come to terms with the events of The Long Goodbye. Indeed, the tone falls somewhere between the bitter defeatism of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and that of Robert Altman’s 1973 film of the same name, a movie disliked by many Chandler fans for its portrayal of Marlowe as a hapless klutz who understands that he is, ultimately, powerless when trapped in a vice constructed of money and power. In The Black-Eyed Blonde, Black acknowledges the general thesis of Chandler’s novel, with Marlowe increasingly aware that he has outlived his time and his code, and wondering if he shouldn’t fold his tent in Los Angeles and move to Paris to become a rich woman’s husband. I liked it a lot, and I hope there’ll be more Marlowe novels from Benny Blanco.

Irène, Pierre Lamaitre
Pierre Lamaitre’s Alex (2013) garnered rave reviews last year, not least for the way Lamaitre reworked the tropes of the conventional serial killer novel to create a clever police procedural which worked as a superb thriller even as it confounded readers’ expectations of the genre. The follow-up, Irène, is equally clever, as the diminutive Parisian detective Camille Verhoeven is initially confronted with a murder scene so horrific it puts him in mind of Goya’s ‘Saturn Devouring his Son’. Were Verhoeven the son of an author rather than a painter, he might have recalibrated his instincts: it soon emerges that the carnage is a note-perfect homage to the double murder carried out by Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Pitting his wits against a killer the media quickly dubs ‘The Novelist’, Verhoeven – who is distinctly unimpressed by the crime fiction genre – uncovers a series of murders which mirror killings detailed in classic crime novels by James Ellroy, John D. MacDonald and William McIlvanney. Just as the reader begins to suspect that the novel is a macabre compilation of the genre’s ‘greatest hits’, however, Lemaitre pulls a switch that forces the reader to reassess everything that has gone before. Translated by Frank Wynne, Irène builds on the considerable promise of Alex and confirms Camille Verhoeven as one of the most intriguing protagonists to emerge in the crime genre in recent years.

The Wolf in Winter, John Connolly
John Connolly blends his usual tropes of the classic private investigator and a gothic flavouring with a simmering rage at the way in which modern American treats its economically disenfranchised. The twelfth of John Connolly’s novels to feature the haunted private eye Charlie Parker, The Wolf in Winter begins with the disappearance of a homeless man, who was himself trying to track down his disappeared daughter. Parker’s investigations take him to the town of Prosperous, an ostensibly civilised and modern community, but one which harbours dark secrets inextricably bound up in its shadowy origins. Arguably the best Charlie Parker tale to date. (And while we’re on the subject of John Connolly, the collection of short stories called ‘Death Sentences’ edited by Otto Penzler includes John’s Anthony Award-winning short story ‘The Caxton Lending Library & Book Depository’).

The Boy That Never Was, Karen Perry
‘Karen Perry’ is a pseudonym for a new writing partnership composed of author Karen Gillece and poet Paul Perry. The story opens with a prologue set in Tangier in 2005, where the readers learns that one of the central protagonists, Harry, is guilty of negligence in the death, during an earthquake, of his young son Dillon. The story then moves to Dublin five years later, when Harry believes he sees his missing son during an anti-government demonstration on O’Connell Street. When he fails to convince the Gardai that Dillon is alive and well, Harry confesses all to his wife, Robin, which is when we start to realise that Harry has a history of obsession and instability, and that Robin also has secrets she needs to conceal. This is by no means the first time we’ve encountered the unreliable narrator – it’s a staple of the crime / mystery genre – but The Boy That Never Was goes one better by giving us a pair of devious narrators, neither of whom we can trust very much. The result is an impressive debut that is equally adept at blending thriller and mystery into an absorbing psychological study.

The Tailor of Panama, John le Carré
Not a book that was first published in 2014, of course, but the best book I read all year.

The Avenue of the Giants, Marc Dugain
Marc Dugain’s The Avenue of the Giants offers an unusual take on a genre tradition, that of the sociopathic serial killer. Set in California in the late 1960s and based on the life of Ed Kemper, aka ‘the Co-Ed Killer’ (whom Dugain acknowledges in his Author’s Note), the story switches between third- and first-person voices, as convicted killer Al Kenner writes an autobiographical account of a trail of destruction that began when, as a disaffected teenager, Kenner murdered his grandparents. It’s an unusual account, not least because Kenner claims that his literary influences include Dostoevsky and Raymond Carver, with the result that the story unfolds in a style of downbeat realism that grows increasingly unsettling and claustrophobic the more Kenner reveals of his prosaically literal mind-set. There are echoes of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me in Kenner’s ability to fool those closest to him with his gee-shucks public persona, which allows the charming but manipulative killer to exploit the virtues of peace and love espoused by his hippy victims.

The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith
Set in London during the bleak winter of 2010, The Silkworm is a sequel to The Cuckoo’s Calling, and again features the private detective and war veteran Cormoran Strike. Strike is intrigued when he is approached by Leonora Quine, who wants him to find her missing husband, the author and former enfant terrible, Owen Quine. Soon, however, Strike discovers that Quine has gone to ground because he has written a slanderous novel, titled Bombyx Mori – which translates as The Silkworm – in which vicious pen-portraits of his wife, editor, publisher, agent and peers are easily identifiable to anyone in the publishing industry. It’s a fine sequel; if Robert Galbraith / JK Rowling is in the crime-writing game for the long haul, this reader will be very pleased indeed.

Young Philby, Robert Littell
The exploits of Adrian Russell ‘Kim’ Philby have been picked over many times, but Robert Littell’s Young Philby takes an intriguing approach to exploring the motivations of the notorious British spy, who defected to the Soviet Union when his cover was finally blown in 1963. The novel begins with a Prologue in 1938, with a Russian ‘handler’ of Philby being interrogated in a Moscow prison, before going back to 1933, and Philby’s arrival in Vienna as Fascism begins to take hold in Austria. Essentially a series of portraits of Philby offered by those he worked with, the story comprises fictionalised encounters between, among others, Philby and his first wife Litzi Friedman, Guy Burgess, Teodor Maly, who first recruited Philby in London, and Evelyn Sinclair, the secretary who recorded conversations at the heart of the British secret service. This last account is the most fascinating of a beautifully detailed mosaic, offering as it does a revolutionary theory on Philby’s career and activities. In re-imagining one of the most familiar figures of the Cold War landscape, Robert Littell has given us a spy thriller of the very highest order.

Perfidia, James Ellroy
Some readers, myself included, might have preferred to meet James Ellroy’s iconic characters in a state of grace, in order to better appreciate their fall. It wasn’t to be, but Perfidia was still one of the best crime novels of the year. It opens in Los Angeles in December 1941, with young LAPD detective Dudley Smith investigating what appears to be a ritual suicide by a Japanese-American family. Expecting a quick result, Smith is confounded with the Japanese navy bombs Pearl Harbour and turns his open-and-shut case into a political time-bomb. Dense, incident-packed, irreverent and intense, it is – for good or ill – vintage Ellroy.

The Surfacing, Cormac James
Cork author Cormac James’ second novel begins in the Arctic Circle in 1850, when we find ourselves aboard the stout ship The Impetus, under the command of Captain Myers and his second-in-command Lieutenant Morgan, as they go in search of the Franklin expedition, which went missing some years previously during a bid to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. The all-male environment aboard The Impetus – now trapped in the shifting ice – is disrupted by a stowaway, Kitty, who is pregnant with Morgan’s child. It’s a fabulously detailed tale, both in its historical research and its depiction of the savagely harsh landscape, but despite the apparent ‘Boys’ Adventure’ nature of the tale, it’s very much a tender, intimate novel about one man’s horror and joy and the prospect of becoming a father. The announcement two months ago by the Canadian government that they had located the wrecks of the Franklin Expedition puts the efforts of the characters here into some perspective, and amplifies the magnificent futility of their epic journey. Superb.

The Monogram Murders, Sophie Hannah
Sophie Hannah ‘resurrects’ Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot for The Monogram Murders, which is set in 1929. When a terrified young woman called Jennie blunders into a London coffee shop and sits at Poirot’s table, however, his famous little grey cells are energised by Jennie’s bizarre story of her impending murder – and her assertion that nothing must be done to stop it, because only then will justice be done. Enter Edward Catchpool of Scotland Yard, a police detective who stands in for Poirot’s regular sounding-board Arthur Hastings, to narrate the story of Poirot’s latest investigation. It centres on a triple killing at the Bloxham Hotel, in which two women and a man are discovered identically murdered in three separate rooms, each with a monogrammed cufflink in their mouths. Sophie Hannah provides a double function in The Monogram Murders: The story is told in Agatha Christie’s style, but it also partly serves as a critique of Christie’s style and methods. ‘I must say,’ Catchpool observes, ‘I did not and never would understand why he required such a sizeable audience. It was not a theatrical production. When I solved a crime … I simply presented my conclusions to my boss and then arrested the miscreant in question.’ All told, it’s a terrific piece of literary ventriloquism.

Us, David Nicholls
Us is David Nicholls’ fourth novel, and probably his most entertaining. As the story begins, Douglas Petersen appears to be suffering the reverse of the conventional male mid-life crisis. A pedantic biochemist contemplating the imminent departure of his teenage son Albie from the family nest, Douglas is – according to the rules of fiction, at least – a prime candidate to be eyeing up a Maserati and tumbling into an ill-advised affair with a woman half his age. As it happens, Douglas rather likes bumbling along in his comfortable, suburban existence, and is very much looking forward to ‘growing old and dying together’ with his wife, Connie. “Douglas,” says Connie, “who in their right mind would look forward to that?” The truth of it is that, now their son is reared and on his way to university, Connie is thinking of leaving Douglas. With a typically old-fashioned ‘grand tour’ of Europe’s galleries and museums already planned, Douglas hopes that the family’s final holiday together will reignite old passions for love, art and life itself – but once they get on the road, things very quickly go from bad to worse. Us is very much an escape, a laugh, a comfort and a thrill, but it is above all a thought-provoking meditation on how very fragile are the ties that bind.

The Burning Room, Michael Connelly
The shot was fired a decade ago but Orlando Merced, a mariachi band member, has only now succumbed to his injuries, which means Harry Bosch has a very unusual ‘open-unsolved’ (aka ‘cold case’) investigation to pursue in The Burning Room, Michael Connelly’s 17th novel to feature the veteran LAPD detective. Bosch, already on borrowed time as a working detective courtesy of the DROP programme, is less than a year from retirement as the story opens, but he has lost none of his edge. What appears at first glance to be a depressingly routine drive-by shooting develops, largely due to Bosch’s instincts, into a complex tale of jealousy, arson, robbery and politically motivated murder, as Connelly, in a story that wears its Raymond Chandler influences lightly, links the street-level crimes of Los Angeles with the city’s highest seats of power. Bosch, teamed here with impressive new recruit Lucy Soto, goes about his work with the same quality of unobtrusive directness that Connelly brings to his prose, the deceptively understated approach disguising a pacy, powerful investigation that yields results when least expected.

Tabula Rasa, Ruth Downie
Set in Roman Britain as the natives’ festival of Samain approaches, Tabula Rasa is Ruth Downie’s sixth novel to feature medicus Gaius Petreius Ruso, who is currently serving with the Twentieth Legion as they build Hadrian’s Wall. When rumours begin to circulate that a dead body has been dumped under the rubble packed into the wall, and the young boy responsible for circulating the rumour goes missing, the already tense relationship between the Romans and the native Britons erupts into hostilities. Ruso’s investigation, which he hopes will defuse the situation, is deftly crafted by Downie, but Tabula Rasa offers far more than the mystery genre’s conventions transplanted to Roman-era Britain. Equally fascinating are the contemporary parallels to be found in the Roman experience of conquering and occupying a foreign territory: their ignorance of the local language and customs, the blinkered arrogance of military power, and the nerve-shredding presence of constant threat.

  So there it is. It’s a busy-busy time right now around CAP Towers, so if you don’t hear from us between now and the holidays, have a terrific Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous New Year. See you on the other side …

The inimitable Myles McWeeney – long a friend of Irish crime writing – reviews three current releases under the title of ‘Queens of Irish Crime Writing’ in the Irish Independent. To wit:

Multi-award-winning writers like Tana French, Alex Barclay and relative newcomer Jo Spain are standing toe-to-toe and slugging it out for bestselling charts dominance with their well-established British counterparts like Val McDermid and Mo Hayder, and US contemporaries Kathy Reichs and Tess Gerritsen.
  But these three high-flying Irish women writers are no flash in the pan. They are part of a highly impressive cohort of Irish female mystery writers who have beaten a path to the top in the past decade or so, including highly regarded bestselling authors like Jane Casey, Arlene Hunt, Niamh O'Connor, Ava McCarthy, Sinead Crowley and 50pc of Karen Perry - (Perry is actually two people, Karen Gillece and Peter Perry). The reason French, Barclay and Spain have been chosen here to represent their sisters in crime is that all three, coincidentally, have just had their latest novels published within days of each other this month.

  For the full review, clickety-click here …

The writing partnership Karen Perry (right) hit the ground running last year with a terrific debut psychological thriller, THE BOY THAT NEVER WAS, so I’m very much looking forward to seeing what they do with their follow-up offering, ONLY WE KNOW (Penguin). Quoth the blurb elves:

Kenya, 1982. The relentless sun beats down on the Maasai Mara. Three children, Nick, Luke and Katie, bored and hot, go down to the river alone. But when their innocent game by the banks of the river goes horribly wrong, their lives are changed forever and they are eternally bound by a shocking and suffocating secret.
  Dublin, 2013. Their secret is buried, but not forgotten, and when Luke goes missing in violent circumstances it becomes clear that their childhood mistakes have come back to haunt them . . .

  ONLY WE KNOW will be published on June 4.

Karen Perry’s THE BOY THAT NEVER WAS (Penguin / Michael Joseph) is an intriguing prospect, being the debut crime thriller from a writing team composed of Karen Gillece and Paul Perry. Karen is the author of several literary novels, including SEVEN NIGHTS IN ZARAGOZA and LONGSHORE DRIFT, while Paul is not only a critically acclaimed author, but a lecturer in Creative Writing for Kingston University, London, Writer Fellow for University College Dublin, and Course Director in Poetry for the Faber Academy in Dublin. Quoth the blurb elves:

You were loved and lost – then you came back …
  Five years ago, three-year-old Dillon disappeared. For his father Harry – who left him alone for ten crucial minutes – it was an unforgivable lapse. Yet Dillon’s mother Robyn has never blamed her husband: her own secret guilt is burden enough.
  Now they’re trying to move on, returning home to Dublin to make a fresh start.
  But their lives are turned upside down the day Harry sees an eight-year-old boy in the crowd. A boy Harry is convinced is Dillon. But the boy vanishes before he can do anything about it.
  What Harry thought he saw quickly plunges their marriage into a spiral of crazed obsession and broken trust, uncovering deceits and shameful secrets. Everything Robyn and Harry ever believed in one another is cast into doubt.
  And at the centre of it all is the boy that never was …

  THE BOY THAT NEVER WAS arrives with impressive advance praise from Tana French, Jeffrey Deaver, John Boyne and Nelson DeMille. For all the details, clickety-click here …

Crime writing partnership Karen Gillece and Paul Perry have established a terrific reputation for psychological thrillers with their first two novels, THE BOY THAT NEVER WAS and ONLY WE KNOW. Their third novel is GIRL UNKNOWN:

When Zoe Barry walks into Professor David Connolly’s office and announces that she is his daughter, he is left reeling. Suddenly his family - imperfect, flawed, but working - is trying to find space for someone new.
  But Zoe’s stories don’t quite add up and lies become indistinguishable from truths. The family struggle to make sense of whether she is a sister, a daughter, a friend, an enemy. But no one could have expected where it all might end.
  Because they have let into their home a girl that they do not know. And now everything they have built has begun to violently, determinedly, break apart.

  GIRL UNKNOWN will be published on June 2nd.

There isn’t generally much call for poetry on Crime Always Pays, but today is Poetry Day Ireland, and Sophie Hannah (right) – best-selling crime novelist, prize-winning poet – will be reading with Paul Perry – one half of crime-writing duo Karen Perry – at Green Street Courthouse in Smithfield at 7pm this very evening. For all the details, clickety-click here.
  Meanwhile, and for the day that’s in it, here’s a couple of poems for your delectation …

Jigsaw

Scatter the pieces on the floor
And put away the box.
Begin again, from memory,
For the pure joy of fingering blind

And the soft fitting together.
Each shape its own thing,
Awkward tongue and teardrop groove,
Only ever snug in its singular place.

Like words, they are, these pieces
Of Arctic Scene With Polar Bear and Seal,
Sifting down out of perfect silence
To settle perfectly blank as snow.


Sorokos

In the Cyclades the light has a brutal purity
Slicing through to the meaning of Pi
So that the world seems hyper-aware,
Self-conscious without ever becoming shy

Like a half-wild cat or empty stage.
They say the Sahara is where it begins,
The sorokos, and grains of sand carried north
To polish the light from within

And set the very molecules a-tremble
In a shimmering dance of rock and sea
That renders the stark and barren reality
An intense, voluptuous dream.

In the islands your itinerary becomes a haiku
Where you relinquish the need for rhyme,
Prismed in the dazzling brilliance of a sliver
Of mirror smashed long before your time.


Bunks

A pirate ship, an upstairs cave,
A reading den or castle sunk,
An indoor treehouse under pixie leaf –
O the possibilities of an upstairs bunk!

The upper an orphanage and menagerie
Of teddies, puppies, tigers and dolls,
The lower a bridge strung with pink fairy lights
To dazzle those ever-lurking trolls.

It was heaven up there and we on the lower
Singing our tuck-in lullabies by night
To those guardian angels who stayed to watch o’er
In the darkest hours before dawn’s early light.

O the possibilities of an upstairs bunk!
And the hope that perhaps tempted fate –
How sad the math of two bunks, one child,
And the vacuum of an impossible weight.

Now and again she would softly sigh
As only a six-year-old can sigh
And wish she had a sister. But Lily –
We tried, my love, O how we tried.

The Mountains to Sea literary festival takes place this year from Thursday 11th to Sunday 14th of September, and as always it’s something of a smorgasbord. I’m delighted to see that there’s a very strong Irish crime writing presence lined up, three of whom are debutants.
  Lee Child , interviewed by the inimitable Declan Hughes, leads the charge. Lee, who claims his Irishness under a variation on FIFA’s ‘grandparent rule’, will also have a short story in the BELFAST NOIR (Akashic Books) anthology later this year. Elsewhere, the line-up includes Sinead Crowley (CAN ANYBODY HELP ME?), Karen Perry (THE BOY THAT NEVER WAS), Liz Nugent (UNRAVELLING OLIVER) and Jane Casey (THE KILL). In addition to her appearance at the festival, Jane Casey will also host a writing workshop.
  For all the details on the Mountains to Sea programme, and how to book tickets, clickety-click here …

It’s that time of the year again, as the Irish Book Awards hove into view on November 26th, when I suggest that [insert year here] has been yet another annus terrificus for Irish crime fiction, aka ‘Emerald Noir’. The shortlist for the Irish Crime Novel of the Year runs as follows:

The Ireland AM Crime Fiction Award

Can Anybody Help Me? by Sinéad Crowley
Last Kiss by Louise Phillips
The Final Silence by Stuart Neville
The Kill by Jane Casey
The Secret Place by Tana French
Unravelling Oliver by Liz Nugent

  As always, however, there were a number of tremendous novels published that didn’t, for various reasons, feature on the shortlist. The following is another short list, of books I’ve read to date this year that are also easily good enough to win the title of best Irish crime fiction novel in 2014. As you might expect, there were also a number of very good novels that I didn’t manage to read this year; but the gist of this post is to celebrate the quality and diversity of Irish crime fiction in 2014. To wit:

The Dead Pass, Colin Bateman
The Black Eyed Blonde, Benjamin Black
The Wolf in Winter, John Connolly
Bitter Remedy, Conor Fitzgerald
Cross of Vengeance, Cora Harrison
The Sun is God, Adrian McKinty
Blue is the Night, Eoin McNamee
The Boy That Never Was, Karen Perry

  Finally, the very best of luck to all the shortlisted nominees on November 26th. Given that she has been oft-nominated and is yet to win, and her Maeve Kerrigan series grows more impressive with each succeeding book, my vote goes to Jane Casey’s THE KILL …

The very best of luck to all the nominees in the Irish Book Awards, which takes place tomorrow night, Wednesday 25th November. Naturally, we'll be keeping a close eye on the Crime Book of the Year category, sponsored by Ireland AM. To wit:

Hearty congratulations to all the authors shortlisted for the Ireland AM Crime Book of the Year, which was announced on November 4th. There are two things here worth noting, I think – the first is that the recent trend of women dominating Irish crime fiction looks set fair to continue; and that Jane Casey has been shortlisted for what is (by my calculations) the 141st time. Surely that woman’s time has come …
  Anyhoo, the shortlist is as follows:

Ireland AM Crime Book of the Year

• EVEN THE DEAD by Benjamin Black (Viking)

• FREEDOM’S CHILD by Jax Miller (HarperCollins)

• ARE YOU WATCHING ME? by Sinead Crowley (Quercus)

• ONLY WE KNOW by Karen Perry (Michael Joseph)

• THE GAME CHANGER by Louise Phillips (Hachette Books Ireland)

• AFTER THE FIRE by Jane Casey (Ebury Press)

  For the details of all the books nominated in all Irish Book Award categories, clickety-click here …

UPDATE: Following on from the Bord Gais Book of the Year awards on November 28th, the voting is now open for the overall Irish Book of the Year. I’m not say that you should vote for John Connolly or Julie Parsons, necessarily, but I am reliably informed that, should the spirit move you to do so, your reward will be in heaven. To vote, clickety-click here …

Hearty congrats to Julie Parsons, who last night won the Irish Independent Crime Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards for THE THERAPY HOUSE; and commiserations to all the joint runners-up, i.e., Jane Casey, Haylen Beck, Cat Hogan, Karen Perry and Sinead Crowley.
  Elsewhere, John Connolly scooped the Ryan Tubridy Listeners’ Choice Award for HE, his marvellous novel about the life and times of Stan Laurel.
  For all the details of the winners in all categories, clickety-click here …

There’s a crime fiction ‘do’ taking place in Dun Laoghaire on July 22nd, when the Pavilion Theatre hosts a number of authors from the Penguin Random House Ireland stable to talk all things murderous and criminal. The event will take place in partnership with the Irish Times, and Irish writers taking part include Benjamin Black (John Banville) and Haylen Beck (Stuart Neville), Karen Perry and Liz Nugent, while Kathy Reichs and Paula Hawkins provide an international flavour. For all the details, including how to book tickets, clickety-click here …

There’s one half of Karen Perry and also Frank Golden, and now Kelly Creighton is the latest Irish poet to publish crime fiction. The Northern Ireland author publishes THE BONES OF IT (Liberties Press) next month, with the blurb running thusly:

A psychological crime thriller set in present day County Down. Twenty-two-year-old Scott McAuley, son of ex-paramilitary Duke McAuley, pens diary entries. When Scott is ousted from his politics degree course for joyriding, he returns home to live with Duke for the first time in his memory. When Scott was a baby, Duke was imprisoned for the murders of two young Catholic men, and Scott’s grandmother, Isla, became his guardian. Scott finds it difficult living with Duke now, and even more so when he starts getting paranoid that Duke is secretly seeing his ex-girlfriend.

  THE BONES OF IT is published on May 15.