One To Watch: Anna Sweeney

It’s looking like it’s going to be a very interesting year for debutant Irish crime fiction in 2014, with Liz Nugent, Siobhan MacDonald and Sinéad Crowley already lined up to publish. Another name to conjure with is Anna Sweeney, who publishes DEADLY INTENT (Severn House) later this month. Quoth the blurb elves:

Maureen lies unconscious on a lonely track. Her husband blames a fellow holidaymaker at Nessa McDermott’s country house on Ireland’s enchanting Beara peninsula. Two days later, a man's body is found, strangled and dumped. Amid a frenzy of police, media and family pressures, former journalist Nessa has to find her own answers - but meanwhile, ambitious young policeman Redmond Joyce is also hellbent on identifying the murderer, and conflict between them grows as they close in on the horrifying truth. Translated from the Gaelic, this novel introduces a talented author with keen observation and detail, and marks the beginning of a series with Nessa and her ambitious policeman acquaintance.

  To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time we’ve had an Irish crime novel translated from Irish into English. Of course, ‘the best of my knowledge’ isn’t exactly encyclopaedic … If anyone can set me straight as to previous examples, I’m all ears.

A River Twists Through It

Siobhan MacDonald (right) will publish her debut, TWISTED RIVER (Exhibit A Books) later this year, the first signing by new Exhibit A editor Byron Quertermous. It’s the first of ‘two gripping, psychological, stand-alone thrillers’ (the second, THE BLUE POOL, will be published in 2015). To wit:

Kate and Mannix O’Brien live with their two children in a quirky house overlooking the Curragower Falls on the Shannon River in Limerick – a city where the haves and have-nots live cheek by jowl.
  On the other side of the Atlantic, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the Harveys own a fashionable brownstone on Riverside Drive.
  When American Oscar Harvey arrives in Limerick and opens the boot of the car his hosts have loaned him, he finds in it the body of a woman … and from this shocking beginning the story spools back to the roots of the house swap, which no one suspects will end in tragedy.

  For all the details, clickety-click here …