CRIME: ANNA CAREYreviews BloodlandBy Alan Glynn Faber Faber, 412pp. £12.99

JIMMY GILROY, the hero of Alan Glynn’s gripping new thriller, used to dream of being a pioneering journalist – a 21st-century Hunter S Thompson or Seymour Hersh. Now, having been laid off from his job as a newspaper reporter and struggling to find challenging work, he has taken on a less lofty job: writing the biography of Susie Monaghan, an Irish soap star and tabloid darling who was killed in a helicopter crash several years earlier. But when his father’s old business partner, a public-relations guru named Phil Sweeney, tries to steer him away from the project, Jimmy gradually starts to wonder whether something bigger and darker lies behind this tragic accident.

It does, as he discovers when another attempt to distract him from the biography accidentally provides him with his biggest lead. As the reader soon realises, the helicopter crash in which Susie was killed is somehow connected to a mining operation in Congo. Clark Rundle, whose family’s company, BRX, owns the mine, is attempting to cover up a shocking incident involving his brother, an American senator with presidential ambitions, and the private military contractor paid to guard him as he pays an unofficial visit to the warlord who rules the mining district.

Glynn is the author of two acclaimed thrillers, The Dark Fields(later made into the Hollywood film Limitless) and, more recently, Winterland.

As Bloodlandprogresses, he builds up the tension skilfully, keeping the reader several steps ahead of Jimmy and increasingly aware of the danger in which our hero finds himself. Glynn seems at home writing about intrigue on both sides of the Atlantic. In a book such as this, clearly aimed at an international readership and with a potential American presidential candidate among the characters, there's a danger that the Irish element could feel shoehorned into the narrative. Irish politicians tend not to play a significant part in huge international corporate games. In Bloodland, however, the relationship between an Irish company with investments in African mining and a giant American corporation with political ties is utterly convincing.

As is Larry Bolger, the former taoiseach who may know a little too much about the dodgier aspects of big business. Frustrated and bored by his postpolitical life, Bolger is the book’s finest character: what could have been a lazy caricature is instead a memorable portrait of a complex man who is painfully aware that his best days are behind him. Now living in a hotel, where he spends his days watching television instead of working on the memoirs he’s contracted to write, Bolger finds himself giving in to temptation of various kinds, and his increasing recklessness has serious consequences.

Bloodlandhas been compared by its publisher to the work of the great John le Carré, but Glynn writes in short, punchy paragraphs that lack le Carré's cool and erudite elegance. Also, he's not immune to cliche, and several characters explain themselves and their motivations to Jimmy a little too conveniently. ("Every story I fed you had an agenda – my agenda!" boasts Phil Sweeney, in the manner of a Scooby Doovillain.)

It is unconvincing, too, that Jimmy, sitting on a potentially huge story, is dismissed by both his opponents and even himself as an unemployed journalist. There’s no such thing as an unemployed journalist, just an underemployed freelancer – and any freelancer would pursue the story Jimmy has uncovered. And while the book is well paced, the ending feels slightly rushed and, when it comes to the fate of certain characters, a little contrived.

But these are minor quibbles. Bloodlandis still an intelligent, well-written and compelling thriller, and Glynn seems utterly at ease whether writing about troubled Dublin businessmen, former private military contractors with post-traumatic stress disorder, bitter politicians or high-flying corporate masters of the universe.

In his portrayal of the brutal conditions in which minerals are often mined in the developing world, he also offers a timely reminder of the human cost of technological advances. But while Bloodlandmakes some serious points, it never forgets that a good thriller is there to entertain the reader as well as to make her think – and this is a very entertaining book.

Anna Carey is a freelance journalist. Her debut novel for young adults, The Real Rebecca, is published by the O'Brien Press