Crime fiction: The City of God; The Hunt; Death Writes; All the Sinners Bleed; The Trap; Assassin Eighteen

Michael Russell’s Garda Detective Inspector Stefan Gillespie has been mired in the intrigues of second World War Europe since debuting with The City of Shadows (2012), set in 1934 Dublin and Danzig. Each instalment has taken him deeper into neutral Ireland’s experience of the war years, challenging Gillespie’s humanity throughout the series, never more so than in The City of God (Hachette, £21.99).

Russell once again populates his plot with historical figures from the Free State, deftly blending fact and fiction to capture the era’s uncertainty, the ambitions of those who try to stop the slaughter and the schemes of those who stand in their way. Most of the action in this eighth instalment takes place in Nazi-occupied Rome as the war draws closer to its end. Working outside the limits of his official capacity, like virtually every other character in this world of grey zones and unspoken or half-spoken truths, Gillespie is tasked with stealing papers “that could be awkward for Ireland” from former Irish diplomat Charles Bewley (depicted unsparingly here), though Gillespie is inevitably embroiled in other interventions along the way. Emphatically noir in the despair and impotence the characters experience, not least in Gillespie’s struggle with neutrality, The City of God is an impressive continuation of this rich series.

Kelly J Ford’s spikily empathetic The Hunt (Thomas & Mercer, £8.99) is, like her first two novels – 2017′s Cottonmouths and 2022′s Real Bad Things – set in a small-town populated largely by working-class and often queer characters. Presley, Arkansas has seen 17 mysterious deaths over recent years, all around the time of the annual spring radio contest The Hunt, driving feverish speculation about a murderer known as The Hunter. “No one knew,” however, whether or not The Hunter was real: “The cops investigated – allegedly, like everything else in Presley – but had turned up nothing but new rumours.” This set-up is less a plot engine than a way to explore people’s lives in a setting as claustrophobic as it is communal. Ford draws a large, persuasive cast, focusing on Nell (tormented by the death of her older brother), her nephew Elijah and her best (perhaps only) friend and “work wife” Ada, whose lives are intimately shaped by their experiences of labour, race and class.

Suspenseful as it is, The Hunt’s real strength is this investment in its characters, depicted with complexity and warmth, while the conclusion only solves some of the puzzle. The resolution Ford offers consists instead in a peace that Nell, Elijah and Ada obtain, one that doesn’t lift the burden of their griefs, or answer all their questions, but that allows them to inhabit their lives less haunted by the mystery of The Hunt.

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Death Writes (Constable, £14.99) is the sixth book in Andrea Carter’s Inishowen series, featuring solicitor Ben O’Keeffe. As her readers know, Ben has carefully kept her Dublin and Inishowen worlds separate. That ends early in Death Writes when she and her love interest Tom Molloy drive to Dublin to check on her ageing parents, a subplot given a quietly affecting depth here. Along the way she considers the “general weirdness of arriving with him at my childhood home; the two halves of my life that had never met colliding without warning”. This “weirdness” quickly parallels a public murder in her otherwise sleepy adopted hometown of Glendara, as a famous writer dies suddenly during his first public appearance in many years.

Carter’s story doesn’t dwell unduly on some sharp roman á clef echoes of recent Irish literary culture, grounding itself rather in the characters that have long been her strength: she is that rare writer of relatively cosy mysteries who brings a rich complexity both to her novels’ crimes and to the characters whose lives are altered by them. That richness is amplified by Carter’s writing about the terrain: her imagined peninsula community, forever at the mercy of its watery landscape, is a graceful example of nature writing in Irish crime fiction.

[ August’s best new crime fiction: The Second Murderer, The Villa, The Art Thief, Yellowface, A Line in the Sand ]

SA Cosby’s deservedly acclaimed previous two novels are a hard act to follow and All the Sinners Bleed (Headline, £20) shows him reaching in new directions. Where protagonists in Blacktop Wasteland (2020) and Razorblade Tears (2021) were ex-cons or reformed criminals seen through Cosby’s empathetic eye for rural life, this novel centres that empathy around Sheriff Titus Crown.

After his FBI career ended suddenly, Crown returned to his Virginia hometown, where he cares for his ageing father and gets elected as the first black sheriff in a county that deifies Confederate figures, one “where violence and mayhem were celebrated as the pillars of a pioneering spirit every Founders’ Day”. Cosby again makes character and plot inseparable here, as the Gothic weight of family and place drives a narrative that offers some redemption only after much grim suffering.

[ Laura Lippman: ‘Crime fiction is an outstanding vehicle for social commentary’ ]

Crown attempts to stop a school shooting but discovers in the aftermath that a serial killer has been murdering young people for years. Rather than imposing a generic killer on this setting, Cosby draws one whose distortions and damnations stem directly from the region’s legacies of brutality, legacies that shape this striking novel and animate the best of his writing.

Catherine Ryan Howard’s The Trap (Blackstone, £14.99) is a psychological thriller distinguished by the author’s characteristic wit. As she does so well, Howard here lures readers into a premature sense of certainty before pulling the rug out, again and again. It has been more than a year since Lucy’s sister has vanished, becoming one of many missing women possibly linked to a serial killer, but displaced in the public eye by more media-friendly cases. Lucy, though, has not moved on, her life frozen at the moment of her sister’s disappearance, until everything breaks loose.

Like many of Howard’s novels, The Trap hinges on public crimes, tracing the effects of media coverage and true crime fandom on the lives of victims and their families. Her writing always gives some weight, some real spark of personality, to those characters’ lives. If by the end The Trap tilts toward twists over character, it more than compensates through the sheer relish with which it embraces the present cultural moment.

[ Andrea Carter: ‘I’m a fan of the golden age of crime fiction, so I tend to write in that style’ ]

John Brownlow’s Assassin Eighteen (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) – a sequel to his debut, Agent Seventeen (2022) – brings a profane wit and some emotional heft to the world of high-end international assassins. As the plot moves through intersections of grotesque wealth, messianic zeal and white nationalism, it’s not hard to see hints of John Wick and Deadpool in the narrator Seventeen’s seemingly boundless abilities and deadpan delivery.

The main villain here (among many) is a Floridian billionaire who hopes to rebuild the world in what she believes to be God’s design. As Seventeen quickly sees, “she is (a) absolutely fucking nuts and (b) entirely serious. That’s the thing about being a multibillionaire. You can be both”. Other less malignant characters are well developed, several of them through substantial backstories set amid the violence of Boko Haram and Mao’s Great Leap Forward. All this risks growing ornately overstuffed and at times familiar, but Brownlow carries it off gleefully, leaning into the genre’s cliches even as he breezes past them. The sharp self-awareness, persistent humour and vivid characters help this enjoyable, lively novel stand out from the crowd.

Brian Cliff and Elizabeth Mannion are the co-editors of Guilt Rules All: Irish Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction