You might not want to see them in charge of investigating real-life crimes, but the best fictional detectives tend to be “one step out of sync”, as is the case with Judith Lee, the protagonist in Dervla McTiernan’s Three Reasons for Revenge (HarperCollins, £16.99).
Having established herself with a Galway-set, award-winning series of novels featuring detective Cormac Reilly, the Australia-based Irish author turns her attention to Melbourne, where Judith Lee is a detective sergeant with the homicide squad. Which makes it a little odd that Alexis Turner, a university student, specifically requests that Judith should investigate her allegation of a sex crime committed by the respected psychologist Robert Walker. How could Alexis know that Judith has history with Walker? And is Walker being falsely accused, or is he a predator hiding in plain sight?
Three Reasons for Revenge is a superbly plotted police procedural but what sets it apart is McTiernan’s willingness to dig deep into Judith’s flaws. Det Sgt Lee is “an angry Sinéad O’Connor” who is “one step out of sync with everyone around her, like an alien masquerading as a human”, and as hard-nosed and unsentimental as they come, cynical about the ideal of justice but determined to do the best job she can in a flawed system.
Herself the victim of institutional corruption, with blood on her hands, Lee is a wonderfully complex and fascinating character, reminiscent of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch but very much her own woman. Dervla McTiernan has published a number of stand-alone titles in addition to the Cormac Reilly novels; Three Reasons for Revenge may well be another one-off novel, but the discerning crime fiction reader will hope it marks the start of a new series.
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Jess Kidd published Murder at Gulls Nest last year, which was set in the post-second World War years and introduced the amateur sleuth Nora Breen, a former nun who left her convent behind forever in order to investigate the disappearance of an old friend.
Now settled in a boarding house in Gore-on-Sea on the Kent coast, Nora returns in Murder at the Spirit Lounge (Faber, £16.99), which opens with the violent death of Mrs Doreen Chimes, a “world renowned spirit medium”, during a seance in which Nora’s regular sparring partner, Det Insp Rideout, is a participant.
A neat variation on the locked-room mystery, the novel finds Nora taking up a position as a reporter for the Gore-on-Sea Herald, which gives her licence to poke her nose into the darker corners of the ostensibly squeaky-clean seaside town. Investigating the death of a spiritualist brings its own challenges for Nora, an ex-nun who refuses to believe in “all that claptrap – summoning spirits, conversing with the dead" despite having spent “three decades pondering the afterlife”, all of which provides Kidd with plenty of opportunity to deploy her dark deadpan wit.
Resolutely independent, sharply observant and offering an unusually compassionate take on the classic amateur detective, Breen is a breath of fresh air.
Chris Brookmyre’s investigative journalist Jack Parlabane debuted in Quite Ugly One Morning back in 1996, and despite publishing a further 24 novels since, Brookmyre is only now getting around to the sequel, Quite Ugly One Evening (Abacus, £22).
Commissioned by a shadowy MI5 figure to investigate a decades-old murder committed by a Russian spy, Parlabane takes an Atlantic cruise from Southampton to New York and quickly finds himself the most likely suspect for a murder effected by lethal poison. The story revolves around the Maskyn family, whose parents created the beloved puppet-based TV show The Imaginators back in the 1960s, but who now find themselves embroiled in the culture wars as they try to reinvent the show for the 21st century and incur the wrath of the howling “anti-woke” mob.
Brookmyre’s trademark jauntily comic style moves things along at a fair old clip but there’s no doubting the point of the exercise as the old-school reporter Parlabane (“I’m on the side of journalism”) takes pot shots at dark-money think tanks, ideological vandalism, social media extremism, weaponised disinformation and the subversion of democracy by bad actors on the Right and Left.
Michelle McDonagh’s fourth novel, If These Walls Could Talk (Hachette Books Ireland, £15.99) opens with Hazel, a Galway-based GP, hearing her property developer husband Darragh crash his jeep during a late-night phone-call as he drives towards Dublin. Gardaí find the wrecked jeep but there’s no sign of Darragh – has he wandered off, concussed, to die in a nearby farm building?
As the days go by with no hint of Darragh reappearing, the disasters pile up: Darragh, Hazel learns, is being investigated for fraud and his connections to a Dubai-based organised crime operation. It’s a terrific set-up, and the first half of If These Walls Could Talk, which is told mainly from Hazel’s perspective, is a gripping account of a woman who feels as if she has “slipped through a crack in reality”.
Gradually, however, the second half comes to be dominated by other voices, including those of Darragh’s loyal PA and a vlogger investigating the ruined shell of an asylum originally built to house “dangerous idiots and curable lunatics”, as a result of which Hazel’s vivid experience of a living nightmare becomes less persuasive.
Set in Los Angeles, Jordan Harper’s modestly titled A Violent Masterpiece (Faber, £9.99) revolves around three characters: Jake Deal, a “nightcrawler” who feeds his online subscribers the gory details of LA’s underworld; Kara Delgado, a fixer with a concierge company catering to the darkest impulses of the obscenely wealthy; and Doug Gibson, a lawyer who agrees to defend TV producer Eric Elgar when Elgar is arrested for sex crimes and accused of being a serial predator targeting teenage girls.
Harper, channelling James Ellroy, sets out his stall early on: “He tells them, ‘LA is America with no place left to run. LA is America with its back against the wall.’” A Violent Masterpiece isn’t a love letter to Los Angeles but a poison pen missive: Jake, Kara and Doug are all cogs in the money-oiled machine, each one fatally flawed because to live in LA is to suck down the corruption along with the smog.
Linked by rumours of a serial killer the LAPD is refusing to acknowledge, the trio gradually gravitate towards one another, sucked down the drain but refusing to go gently into the darkest of nights. “The weapon is the true American art form. The revolver, the machine gun, the nuclear bomb – all of them invented by American men. We are descended from geniuses of death. This country is a violent masterpiece. It can never be anything else."
Bleakly nihilistic and stained with the darkest noir, A Violent Masterpiece isn’t quite the meisterwerk its title suggests, but it certainly packs a hell of a punch.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).
