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 …

Nobody Move, This is a Review: ELEGY FOR APRIL by Benjamin Black

John Banville’s alter ego is back with a fourth Benjamin Black novel, the third in the Quirke series. This time, the pathologist has been in situ at an institution called St John of the Cross, drying out. When he comes home, his daughter asks him to investigate the disappearance of her best friend, April Latimer, a well-connected junior doctor at the same hospital where he works.
  April is independent-minded and is considered to have something of a ‘wild’ reputation in the conservative social atmosphere of Dublin in the 1950s, dictated by a patriarchal Catholic hierarchy which is headed by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, who pops up fictionally as a confidante of April’s family. (Other real-life characters of the time also find their way into the story, which can, at times, feel like over-embellishment).
  Quirke humours his daughter, and quickly gets to work doing what he does best: poking around, conducting post-mortems on people’s buried secrets and asking questions in an intensely claustrophobic city where a scandal can be hushed up with one phone call from a government minister’s office to a newspaper editor. What he eventually uncovers is deeply unsettling and, combined with Black’s superb characterisation and sense of place, ELEGY FOR APRIL will insinuate itself into the dark crevices of your mind like the novel’s ubiquitous Dublin fog. - Claire Coughlan

An APRIL For April

With an unerring eye for the myriad marketing possibilities, Henry Holt releases Benny Blanco’s ELEGY FOR APRIL in – oh yes! – April. Quoth the blurb elves:

Quirke—the hard-drinking, insatiably curious Dublin pathologist—is back, and he’s determined to find his daughter’s best friend, a well-connected young doctor April Latimer has vanished. A junior doctor at a local hospital, she is something of a scandal in the conservative and highly patriarchal society of 1950s Dublin. Though her family is one of the most respected in the city, she is known for being independent-minded; her taste in men, for instance, is decidedly unconventional. Now April has disappeared, and her friend Phoebe Griffin suspects the worst. Frantic, Phoebe seeks out Quirke, her brilliant but erratic father, and asks him for help. Sober again after intensive treatment for alcoholism, Quirke enlists his old sparring partner, Detective Inspector Hackett, in the search for the missing young woman. In their separate ways the two men follow April’s trail through some of the darker byways of the city to uncover crucial information on her whereabouts. And as Quirke becomes deeply involved in April’s murky story, he encounters complicated and ugly truths about family savagery, Catholic ruthlessness, and race hatred. Both an absorbing crime novel and a brilliant portrait of the difficult and relentless love between a father and his daughter, this is Benjamin Black at his sparkling best.

  Last year brought us John Banville’s THE INFINITIES, of course, which is a terrific read for anyone who hasn’t caught up with it yet. It’s highly unlikely ELEGY FOR APRIL will be in the same league, but hey, even a workmanlike Banville is better than no Banville at all.