The Set Up

Fiction: During the late 1980s Liz Allen was one of Ireland most high-profile crime reporters, so it wasn't surprising that when she turned her writing skills to fiction, the genre she chose was crime. Her second novel, even more than her first, Last to Know, mines her experience of the crime reporter's beat in Dublin and her extensive knowledge of Garda operations and the criminal underworld.

Three young, attractive, high-achieving Dublin women are missing and the story starts when gardaí finally twig than there might be some connection between the disappearances. Enter two feisty women to solve the mystery: Kate Waters, a psychological profiler and academic called in to help the police, and Jenny Smith, a top crime reporter on one of Dublin's newspapers.

It's grisly, explicit stuff, particularly the scenes involving the women and their captor - a seriously disturbed man whose abusive childhood at the hands of his father is put forward in graphic detail as an explanation for his behaviour. Allen packs her novel with detail of how the Irish police work - maybe a little too much detail at the expense of character development, but there are enough clever twists and turns to keep the plot moving at a cracking pace. The police, incidentally, come out of the investigation looking particularly inept.

Geographically and in terms of the language Allen uses, it's very much a Dublin book and her dialogue as well as her descriptive style is gritty and pacey. There's a touch of glamour (the women are held captive in the Caribbean, New York and Los Angeles, there are private jets, and the Howth home of the crime boss is a model of bad-taste bling), but the darkness of the story - even of the key subplot involving the death of the top cop's child - is pervasive.

Bernice Harrison is an Irish Times journalist

The Set Up By Liz Allen Hodder, 443pp. £6.99