Nobody Move, This Is A Review: Adrian McKinty, Benjamin Black, Niamh O’Connor

Some reviews for your delectation, O Three Regular Readers, the first batch of which were published in the Sunday Independent earlier this month, and which concentrate on Irish crime offerings. First up, Adrian McKinty’s FALLING GLASS. To wit:

FALLING GLASS is Adrian McKinty’s sixth offering, a thriller in which an underworld enforcer, Killian, is commissioned to track down Rachel, the ex-wife of a wealthy Northern Ireland businessman, who has absconded with his two daughters. Naturally, things do not go smoothly for Killian, for the most part because a ruthless killer, a Russian soldier and veteran of the brutal conflict in Chechnya, is also on the woman’s trail. Framed by an increasingly violent game of one-upmanship, the story hurtles down the tortuously twisting byways of rural Northern Ireland.

  However, a number of elements set FALLING GLASS apart from conventional shoot-’em-up thrillers. McKinty has established himself as a writer who blends riveting plots, a muscular kind of poetry and blackly comic flourishes, investing his fully rounded characters with thoughtful insights that frequently veer off at tangents into something akin to philosophy …

  For the rest, which includes reviews of Benjamin Black’s ELEGY FOR APRIL and Niamh O’Connor’s TAKEN, clickety-click here …

  Elsewhere, the Irish Times published the latest ‘Crime Time’ round-up of new titles two weeks ago, said column containing reviews of the latest offerings from Lynda La Plante, Karin Fossum, John Hart, Stella Rimington and Charles Cumming. I particularly liked Karin Fossum’s THE CALLER and Charles Cumming’s THE TRINITY SIX, with the latter review coming in the wake of the Stella Rimington, and kicking off thusly:

More deserving of the Le Carré comparisons is Charles Cumming’s fifth novel, THE TRINITY SIX. As a young man, Cumming was recruited by MI6, and his experience working for the Secret Intelligence Service is so palpable here that Cumming can at one point even afford to allow his hero, Dr Sam Gaddis, to wander into post-modern territory near the Ferris wheel made famous by Orson Welles in the classic movie ‘The Third Man’ ...

  It’d been years since I’d read a good old-fashioned spy thriller, and THE TRINITY SIX reminded me of how much I used to love them. Good timing, too, with the film adaptation of TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY on the way in the next couple of weeks. Anyway, for the rest of the Irish Times column, clickety-click here …

  Meanwhile, if anyone can point me in the direction of some good contemporary spy thrillers, I’d be very grateful indeed …