The author of Holy Cross: The Untold Story (2004) and Lethal Allies: British Collusion in Ireland (2013), former journalist Anne Cadwallader’s debut novel Crossing Over (Mercier Press, £15.99) opens with English lawyer Eleanor “Lena” Dawson relocating from London to Belfast in 1987 in a bid to make a fresh start.
Ignorant of the harsh realities of Northern Ireland (“She had not expected charm, but the city failed even as gritty drama.”) and naive in her belief in the unbiased neutrality of British justice, Lena, the daughter of a British army chaplain, is plunged into an alien world of “supergrass” trials, no-jury courts and daily tit-for-tat murders. When she is challenged by Luke Maguire, formerly “the godfather of terrorism” and now Sinn Féin’s spokesman, to apply her high standards to a case in which Luke’s brother Danny was allegedly murdered by the RUC in a shoot-to-kill operation, Lena’s life quickly starts to spiral out of control.
“Her very identity was being stolen,” muses Lena. “All the millions of moist-eyed Brits on successive Remembrance Sundays, how would they feel if they knew the country’s political elite tolerated such epic lawbreaking, up to and including murder?”
Elegantly written, and drawing on Cadwallader’s own experience as a BBC Northern Ireland journalist during the Troubles, Crossing Over is a complex novel that expertly blends politics, violence, law and media into a grippingly authentic narrative.
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Rosemary Hennigan’s The Hotel Guest (Hachette Books Ireland, £15.99) opens with Kit Costigan returning to the “cursed paradise” of Abbaye de St Maurice, a luxury hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva where Kit worked as a waitress for a summer a decade before, when she was befriended by “the Olympians”, a group of young libertines and philosophy students dedicated to exploring “the responsibility of free choice”. With Louis, a renegade Olympian, now about to publish a tell-all memoir, Kit takes us back to that terrible summer, when existentialist theories funnelled a reckless gang of rich kids down the path to murder.
Hennigan’s third novel will likely draw comparisons with Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, as her “Bloomsbury Group coded” cabal act out their privileged rebellion against a backdrop of luxury and hauntingly beautiful landscapes; meanwhile, Kit, who has arrived at the Abbaye de St Maurice fleeing a life that is “ugly and sordid”, has secrets of her own that she is desperate to keep hidden. Kit makes for an achingly vulnerable narrator as she guides us along neatly plotted parallel narratives as the story moves inexorably towards its explosive climax.
Catriona Ward’s Nowhere Burning (Viper, £16.99) opens in Boulder, Colorado, with teenager Riley and her young brother Oliver escaping her abusive foster-parent Cousin and fleeing into the nearby Rocky Mountain National Park. There the pair find refuge at Nowhere, an old settlement in a remote valley where runaway teens fend for themselves and provide asylum to children seeking protection.
But as the seemingly idyllic sanctuary gradually begins to reveal its more sinister side, Riley realises that the teens observe a blood-cult devoted to the memory of the Hollywood actor Leaf Winham and the urban legends that have attached themselves to his name since he died in a fire some decades previously. Riley has already killed twice to protect Oliver and reach Nowhere – will she need to kill again in order to fight her way out of a hellish trap?
The early allusions to Peter Pan quickly give way to a Lord of the Flies tale of murderous anarchy in Nowhere Burning, a blend of crime, horror and Southern Gothic that also pays homage to Davis Grubb’s The Night of the Hunter. Flashbacks to Leaf Winham’s occupation of Nowhere some decades previously aren’t fully convincing as Ward seeks to bolster Nowhere’s horror credentials, but the contemporary story of Riley’s desperate attempts to keep Oliver safe delivers a nightmarish brew of blood, sacrifice and twisted faith.
The young investigative journalist Nicoletta Sarto made a name for herself in Dublin media circles in the late 1960s in Claire Coughlan’s debut Where They Lie (2004), but the sequel, Among the Ruins (Simon & Schuster, £16.99), begins with Nicoletta, now the mother of infant twins (“an amateur mother, playing house”), chafing at the restrictions imposed on her professional career by her male bosses.
Her partner Barney, himself a journalist, definitely doesn’t want Nicoletta involving herself in the story he’s pursuing as he curries favour with “The Rook”, aka Ray Hall, a Dublin career criminal who specialises in art theft from country houses. Unfortunately for Barney, Nicoletta has an uncanny nose for a good story, and soon she’s chasing after a missing painting that is one-half of a diptych painted by Edvard Dunst, an artwork that may well have been the motive for the murder of an old woman by her care worker.
Patronised at every turn (“For God’s sake, Nicoletta, not everything has to be about your big opportunity to be the next Nancy Drew.”), Nicoletta is nothing if not fiercely dedicated to exposing the truth, a firebrand who quietly but determinedly incinerates every misogynist she encounters as she relentlessly pounds her beat.
Spies and Other Gods (Baskerville, £20) is the fourth novel from ex-British intelligence officer James Wolff (the name is a pseudonym), which opens with Aphra McQueen, formerly an academic specialising in medieval history, researching a complaint against “the Service” on behalf of a parliamentary intelligence and security committee.
The investigation, which centres on an allegation that the Service has been negligent in acting upon information received about a state-sponsored assassin who is murdering Iranian dissidents on European soil, is firmly resisted by Sir William Rentoul, the fusty head of the Service who is an old-school spook from the cold war days, this on the basis that Aphra is proposing to shed light on a live intelligence operation.
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With the battle-lines drawn, Wolff proceeds to craft a quirky spy novel by employing black humour, an offbeat narrative voice (the story is told by a disembodied “spirit of spying”) and a host of morally questionable spooks to shine a harsh light on the inner workings of British intelligence. The comparisons with Mick Herron’s Slough House series are inevitable, but they are also very favourable: Wolff may wear his insider’s knowledge lightly, but Spies and Other Gods is a hugely entertaining spy novel with considerable emotional heft.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).
