Review: The Best Crime Novels of 2015

“And so this is Christmas,” as John Lennon once so astutely observed, “and what have you done?” Well, as always, I mostly read. Herewith be the list of my favourite / most enjoyable / most memorable crime novels from 2015:

The crime fiction year opened with a bang, appropriately enough, with Adrian McKinty’s Gun Street Girl (Serpent’s Tail), the fourth in a series featuring Sean Duffy. A Catholic detective with the RUC, Duffy investigates a double-killing as the news of the impending Anglo-Irish Agreement sends Northern Ireland into a turmoil of strikes, riots and violence.

Set in the 1970s, Celeste Ng’s impressive debut Everything I Never Told You (Black Friars) investigates the tragic life and death of Ohio teen Lydia Lee, creating a heartbreaking portrait of a teenage girl struggling to cope with unbearable and conflicting pressures.
  Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (Doubleday) was an equally impressive first outing, and one of the year’s publishing sensations (touted as this year’s Gone Girl), as alcoholic Rachel turns amateur sleuth when a woman goes missing. Steve Cavanagh’s The Defence (Orion) was another debut, a rollicking tale of New York lawyer Eddie Flynn going into court with a bomb strapped to his back to defend a Russian mobster. Attica Locke’s third offering, Pleasantville (Serpent’s Tail), is another to feature a lawyer, as Jay Porter tries to extricate the personal from the political as reluctantly defends an alleged killer during a mayoral election in Houston, Texas, against the backdrop of a campaign of very dirty tricks.

  A Song of Shadows (Hodder & Stoughton) was John Connolly’s 13th novel to feature private eye Charlie Parker, and arguably his best, as Parker – no stranger to evil – finds himself immersed in the horrors of the Holocaust and evolving into something of a Christ-like figure. The Shut Eye (Bantam Press) was Belinda Bauer’s sixth novel, and another tinged with the supernatural, in which hard-nosed DCI John Marvel finds his scepticism tested to the limit in a thoughtful meditation on faith, hope and belief. Over in Colorado, FBI agent Ren Bryce returned in Killing Ways (Harper Collins), Alex Barclay’s seventh novel. Bryce tracks a serial killer in an unusually poignant thriller featuring moments of poetic horror.

  Richard Beard’s superb Acts of the Assassins (Harvill Secker) was a time-bending tale employing modern weaponry and infrastructure in which Roman investigator Gallio searches for the rabble-rousers who stole the corpse of the local mystic Jesus from his tomb in the wake of the prophet’s crucifixion. Camille (MacLehose) concluded Pierre Lemaitre’s impressive trilogy about the diminutive Parisian police detective, Camille Verhoeven, with Camille racing to track down a killer while constantly second-guessing his own motives and capabilities.
  In June, the ever reliable Karin Fossum delivered The Drowned Boy (Harvill Secker), in which her series detective, the brooding Norwegian Inspector Sejer, investigates the tragic death of a toddler with Down’s syndrome. Dennis Lehane concluded his excellent Joe Coughlin trilogy with World Gone By (Little, Brown), which was set in Florida and Cuba, and charted the turbulent transition of America’s criminal fraternity from the riotous gangster era to the more organised crime of the Mafia.

  Elmer Mendoza’s Silver Bullets (MacLehose) was a Mexican ‘narco’ novel featuring Detective Edgar ‘Lefty’ Mendieta, a bracingly bleak but blackly comic tale of murder investigation set in a country where “nothing is true, nothing is false.” Set in Belfast, Those We Left Behind (Harvill Secker), Stuart Neville’s sixth novel, featured DCI Serena Flanagan and explored the physical and psychological damage wrought by the actions of two apparently sociopathic – but heartbreakingly vulnerable – young boys. Simon Mawer’s Tightrope (Little, Brown) was a superior spy novel set in the post-WWII years, an absorbing tale about Marian Sutro, a former war hero whose notions of patriotism and honour are ripped apart as the Cold War chills to deep freeze.

  Even the Dead (Penguin) was Benjamin Black’s seventh offering in the increasingly impressive series featuring the pathologist Quirke. Here the depiction of a genteel 1950s Dublin belie a brutally noir moral relativism, as Quirke sinks into a quicksand of politics and religion. Sinead Crowley’s sophomore offering, Are You Watching Me? (Quercus), was an assured take on the ‘domestic noir’ genre, as Garda Detective Claire Boyle tracks the stalker who is making life hell for media ingénue Liz Cafferky. Jon Steele concluded with another trilogy with the fantastic (and fantastical) The Way of Sorrows (Blue Rider Press), as Harper, an angel in human form, complete with Chandleresque quips, goes to war against the forces of Evil for humanity’s soul.
  Jane Casey’s After the Fire (Ebury Press) featured her series heroine, London-based DC Maeve Kerrigan. “Casey writes with a deft wit and immense skill,” wrote Declan Hughes in these pages. “The Maeve Kerrigan books keep getting better and better.” Mark Henshaw’s The Snow Kimono (Tinder Press) centred on retired Parisian police inspector Auguste Jovert in an unusual crime novel, with Jovert playing the part of reluctant confessor to an elaborately detailed declaration of guilt. Julia Heaberlin’s third novel, Black-Eyed Susans (Penguin), was a brilliantly constructed tale of parallel narratives as teenager Tessie and adult Tess recount their horrific story of being abducted and left for dead by a seasoned serial killer in an engrossing exploration of the morality of the death penalty.

  Lynda La Plante returned to the iconic heroine of Prime Suspect for Tennison (Simon & Schuster), offering a tale of how Tennison came of age as a policewoman in the early 1970s when she is seconded to an investigation into the murder of a 17-year-old girl found naked and strangled on Hackney Marshes. In a good year for Irish crime fiction, Jo Spain’s With Our Blessing (Quercus) was a remarkably assured debut that introduced Inspector Tom Reynolds in an old-fashioned murder mystery (albeit one freighted with the pain of recent Irish history) set in a convent.

  This article was first published in the Irish Times.

  So there it is, folks. It’s been another great year, and thank you kindly to everyone who dropped by ye olde blogge. A happy and peaceful Christmas to you all, and I’ll see you all back here come the New Year …

Review: SILVER BULLETS by Elmer Mendoza

Detective Edgar ‘Lefty’ Mendieta, the main player in Elmer Mendoza’s English-language debut, likes ‘an impossible case’. Not because Lefty is any kind of cerebral sleuth, a Poirot or Holmes seeking out the most difficult crimes in order to stimulate his little grey cells, but because Lefty is a Mexican policeman operating in the city of Culiacán with the Federal Preventative Police, and his experience is that murder cases tend to be ignored, covered up, deliberately botched or otherwise swept under the carpet. It’s for the best, Lefty believes, if his superiors declare a murder ‘an impossible case’ as soon as possible, and preferably before Lefty gets to the crime scene, so as not to wastefully expend the already pitiful resources of the FPP.
  Unfortunately for Lefty, the murder of Bruno Canizales can’t be easily filed under ‘impossible’, especially as the murderer rather flamboyantly used silver bullets when assassinating the high-profile bisexual attorney. Was the killer Canizales’ tempestuous lover Paolo Rodriguez, who subsequently committed suicide? His other tempestuous lover, the dancer Francisco Aldana? Or was the murder orchestrated by the all-powerful ‘Narcos’ who control Mexico’s drug trade, and who control virtually every politician, judge and policeman in the country?
  Lefty Mendieta is a terrific creation, a gloomy, intellectual introspective who is resolutely cynical about the world and his place in it. “What did he know about modernism, or postmodernism for that matter, or intangible cultural heritage?” Lefty asks of himself on the very first page, establishing the parameters of Elmer Medoza’s investigation into contemporary Mexico but also, courtesy of the high-falutin’ pondering, tipping us the wink that Mendoza’s own exploration of the culture will very likely shed no more light on the truth than one of Lefty’s ‘impossible cases’.
  And so it proves, as Lefty doggedly pursues the clues and the killer with the penchant for silver bullets, his efforts leading him down numerous blind alleys as he wonders about the significance of the bullets themselves and whether they are being employed for mythical purposes in order to kill a modern vampire or a werewolf. Lefty is happy to reference James Bond and Gary Cooper, but he’s no hero or tarnished knight, willing to acquiesce when his boss tells him to drop the case and equally happy to accept bribes in the form of cash in a brown envelope. That said, he’s no coward either, and he goes where the investigation leads him, even when it takes him right to the gates of the region’s most feared Narco, Marcelo Valdés. Not that Lefty, living his life according to the surreal logic of contemporary Mexico, is a slave to procedure: “He reminded himself that no expert follows the evidence, since in this business the truth always resides precisely where it should not.”
  For all of Mendoza’s comic asides, however, Silver Bullets is a serious novel about an entire culture in thrall to the ‘Narcos’. In Mendoza’s poverty-stricken Mexico, the cops are corrupt and the bad guys are the people’s champions, benefactors of communities and heirs to the romantic ideal of the outlaws who destroyed the status quo of the landed gentry. Mendoza’s style is as dense in its own way as James Ellroy at his best (or worst), with dialogue condensed into paragraphs with little by way of punctuation to tell the reader who is speaking. The effect is that you pay very close attention to who is speaking or you quickly find yourself lost, an effect that suggests Mendoza is criticising those who only glance at Mexico’s tragedy and then avert their eyes.
  It’s a superb novel, a blackly comic tale akin to the bracing realism of Dashiell Hammett’s early work that leaves the reader feeling claustrophobic, grimy and entirely hopeless about Mexico’s immediate future – a country where, as Lefty Mendieta grimly observes, “Nothing is true, nothing is false.” ~ Declan Burke

  Silver Bullets by Elmer Mendoza is published by MacLehose.

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.