Read It And Weep

I’m currently reading Mark O’Sullivan’s CROCODILE TEARS (Transworld Ireland) and hugely enjoying the company of Detective Inspector Leo Woods, who is, to put it mildly, no great respecter of reputations. To wit:

Bloody psychiatrists, Leo thought, useless bastards with their talk of drives and complexes dreamed up by that coke-head fiend Freud. Everything was about sex with those clowns. Except sex. Which was about death.

  Leo Woods is a bleakly, blackly funny character, and has good reason to be, but Mark O’Sullivan has a tasty way with a turn of phrase too:

She felt as though she’d stepped into some ancient mythological world where gods ripped living things to pieces, feasted on them, tossed the bloodied bones aside and returned to their sky, staining it red with dawn. She looked at the distant horizon, barbaric in its roseate beauty.

  CROCODILE TEARS will be published in April. If there’s a better Irish crime fiction debut published this year, I’ll be very pleasantly surprised.