The Irish Times’ Crime Fiction ‘Best Of’ 2018

The Irish Times published a ‘Best of Crime Fiction 2018’ column last weekend. My two cents runs as follows:

Mick Herron’s London Rules (John Murray), the fifth in his blackly comic ‘Jackson Lamb’ spy series, got the year off to a cracking start as it filleted the pretensions of Britain’s contemporary intelligence forces. Dirk Kurbjuweit delivered a gripping account of domestic terror in Fear (Orion), in which a family comes to terms with living cheek-by-jowl with its stalker. Alafair Burke’s 12th novel, The Wife (Faber), surfed the #metoo zeitgeist in a psychological thriller about a woman forced to second-guess her instincts and principles.

  Set in the Australian Outback, Jane Harper’s brilliant second novel, Force of Nature (Little, Brown), proved her award-winning debut The Dry was no fluke. Olivia Kiernan’s Dublin-set police procedural debut, Too Close to Breathe (riverrun), immediately established her as the heir to Tana French’s throne. Another debut, Cormac O’Keeffe’s Black Water (Black and White), was set on Dublin’s Grand Canal and delivered the darkest noir Irish crime fiction had to offer this year.
  John Connolly’s The Woman in the Woods (Hodder & Stoughton) was the 16th in his Charlie Parker series of Maine-set private eye novels, which reliably wove supernatural chills through a classic hardboiled set-up. Meanwhile, in Memento Mori (Bloomsbury), Ruth Downie’s series investigator, the Roman medicus Ruso, sets out to disprove a supernatural element in a murder in the spa town Aquae Sulis, aka modern Bath. Megan Abbott’s Give Me Your Hand (Picador) was a gripping psychological thriller which drilled down through the genre’s conventions to get to the biochemistry of sociopathy.

  Under the Night (Faber) by Alan Glynn was a thrilling ride through the darker pages of recent American history, and served as a prequel to, and sequel of, his debut The Dark Fields. Michael Connelly’s Dark Sacred Night (Orion) brought together Harry Bosch and Renée Ballard to investigate the cold case of a teenage girl murdered some decades ago. Eoin McNamee’s The Vogue was a lyrical, darkly poetic account of historical abuse and cold-blooded murder in small-town Northern Ireland. Liz Nugent’s third novel, Skin Deep (Penguin), blended reimagined Irish folktales and the contemporary psychological thriller to spectacular effect. Finally, Kevin McCarthy’s Wolves of Eden (W.W. Norton) was an epic account of a murder investigation conducted in the Old West as Fort Phil Kearny finds itself besieged by Chief Red Cloud. ~ Declan Burke

  This feature was first published in the Irish Times. For Declan Hughes’ ‘Best Of’, clickety-click here …

News: Steve Cavanagh Wins the CWA Gold Dagger Award

Hearty congratulations to Steve Cavanagh, whose novel THE LIAR (Orion) won the CWA Gold Dagger Award on Thursday, October 25th – no mean feat, given that Attica Locke, Dennis Lehane and Mick Herron were also shortlisted in the Gold Dagger category.
  Published in 2017, THE LIAR is the third in Steve’s Eddie Flynn series (the most recent, THIRTEEN, has just been shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards). Quoth the blurb elves:

IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE ...
  WHO IS DEADLIER ...
  Leonard Howell’s worst nightmare has come true: his daughter Caroline has been kidnapped. Not content with relying on the cops, Howell calls the only man he trusts to get her back.
  ... THE MAN WHO KNOWS THE TRUTH ...
  Eddie Flynn knows what it’s like to lose a daughter and vows to bring Caroline home safe. Once a con artist, now a hotshot criminal attorney, Flynn is no stranger to the shady New York underworld.
  ... OR THE ONE WHO BELIEVES A LIE?
  However, as he steps back into his old life, Flynn realizes that the rules of game have changed - and that he is being played. But who is pulling the strings? And is anyone in this twisted case telling the truth...?

  For more on Steve Cavanagh, clickety-click here …

Public Interview: Michael Connelly at City Hall, Dublin

I’m hugely looking forward to interviewing Michael Connelly later this month, when he appears at City Hall, Dublin, as part of his tour to promote the new Harry Bosch / Renee Ballard novel, DARK SACRED NIGHT (Orion).
  Michael appears as part of the Murder One festival, which takes place in Dublin from November 2nd-4th, and which will feature Lynda la Plante, Mark Billingham, Jane Casey, Sinead Crowley, Mick Herron, Declan Hughes, Peter James, Ali Land, Val McDermid, Liz Nugent, Niamh O’Connor, Julie Parsons, Anthony Quinn, Jo Spain, William Ryan and Ruth Ware, among many others.
  To book tickets for Michael Connelly interview, clickety-click here …
  For all the details on Murder One, clickety-click here …

Feature: Crime Novels of the Year 2017

’Tis the season for end-of-year round-ups, so here’s my half of the Irish Times’ feature on 2017’s best crime fiction. To wit:

The year got off to a cracking start with Ali Land’s Good Me, Bad Me (Penguin Michael Joseph, €14.99), a genuinely unsettling novel of complex motivations that tests the reader’s capacity for empathy as teenager Milly struggles to cope with the horrors perpetrated by her mother. Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly (Serpent’s Tail, €15.99) was yet another densely plotted, blackly hilarious outing for Adrian McKinty’s protagonist Sean Duffy, a Catholic detective working for the RUC during Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’.

  Melissa Scrivner Love’s Lola (Point Blank, €14.99) was a brilliant debut, a bleak and cynical noir set in the patriarchal gangland world of LA’s South Central, with smack-peddler Lola pulling her gang’s strings as she does whatever it takes to survive. The Late Show by Michael Connelly (Orion, €15.99) delivered a terrific new protagonist: Renee Ballard, a hard-nosed LAPD detective who can more than hold her own with Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller. Sabine Durrant’s Lie With Me (Mulholland Books, €17.99) was a superb comi-tragic psychological thriller set on an Ionian island, a novel which owes, and handsomely repays, a debt to Patricia Highsmith.
  Dennis Lehane has written private eye novels, gangster novels and standalone thrillers. Since We Fell (Little, Brown, €16.99) offered another sub-genre variation as Lehane delivered a wonderful blend of melodrama and domestic noir. Spook Street (John Murray, €19.85) was the fourth, and arguably the best, in Mick Herron’s ‘Slough House’ series of spy novels, which feature spymaster Jackson Lamb and a charming collection of has-beens and never-will-bes.

  Let the Dead Speak (HarperCollins, €13.99) was the seventh in Jane Casey’s series to feature police detective Maeve Kerrigan, a variation on the locked-room mystery as Maeve investigates the whereabouts of a missing corpse in a London suburb underpinned by religious fanaticism and patriarchal sexism. Stuart Neville published Here and Gone (Harvill Secker, €18.45) under the pseudonym Haylen Beck, delivering an adrenaline-fuelled thriller set in the badlands of Arizona. Insidious Intent (Little, Brown, €16.99) was the tenth in Val McDermid’s Tony Hill & Carol Jordan series, but there’s no sense that Val is resting on her laurels – the novel delivered one of the most shocking denouements of the year. Set in 1939, Michael Russell’s The City of Lies (Constable, €16.99) was the fourth to feature Dublin-based Special Branch detective Stefan Gillespie, with Gillespie dispatched to Berlin, a city drunk on power and triumph but already suffering from mass psychosis.

  Finally, John le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (Viking, €14.99) hauled George Smiley’s old factotum, Peter Guillam, out of his well-earned retirement, as London’s contemporary spymasters investigate the possibility that Peter, Smiley & Co. deliberately put civilian lives at risk when mounting the operation that led to the death of Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It may not be vintage le Carré, but it’s a marvellously evocative trip down memory lane.

  For other half – i.e., Declan Hughes’ half – of the list, clickety-click here …

Bristol, Dublin, And On To The Greek Isles …

It’s been a busy few days here at CAP Towers, not least because I wasn’t actually at CAP Towers – I trundled off to Bristol for the weekend, for the annual Crimefest bash, and tremendous fun it was too. Part of the attraction, of course, is that you get to swan about for an entire weekend pretending to be a writer without having to worry about anyone muttering darkly about the emperor’s new clothes, but mainly it’s all about the people, and catching up with some very good sorts you only get to meet once a year. It was also very nice, this year, to be attending the Severn House 40th anniversary celebration, although I did feel a bit of a fraud, given that I’ve only been with Severn House for about six months. Not that you’d have known that, given the warmth of the welcome …
  I also took part in a very enjoyable panel (enjoyable for me, at least) on private eye fiction, alongside Mick Herron, James Carol and Kerry Wilkinson, and curated by the indomitable Donna Moore, who stepped in at the last minute when the original moderator, Ruth Downey, was indisposed. All told, it was a wonderful weekend, and I’m already looking forward to Crimefest 2015 …
  Back to Dublin, then, and the ‘State of Crime’ event at the Central Library, as part of the Dublin Writers Festival last night, where I took my turn hosting Arne Dahl, Sinead Crowley and Brian McGilloway. Lovely people, great writers and a terrific audience made for a very enjoyable evening indeed.
  In the midst of all that, the Publishers Weekly review for my current tome, the comic crime caper CRIME ALWAYS PAYS (Severn House), popped up, which was very nice. The gist runs as follows:

“Burke’s zany sequel to 2007’s The Big O practically requires a scorecard to keep track of the characters [as] a motley crew of misfits leave a trail of chaos and confusion from Ireland to the Greek Isles … Burke keeps adding more characters, making for a profusion of drugs, cops, grifters, guns, and shifting alliances that’s both baffling and entertaining.” – Publishers Weekly

  With which, as you can imagine, I am very pleased indeed.
  Right – back to the grindstone. Normal-ish service will resume tomorrow …