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Patrick McGrath is a masterful and elegant writer of suspenseful situations that delicately unravel unhinged characters on a downward spiral into madness. The writing is beautifully crafted, full of barely perceptible insinuation, erotic undercurrents and anticipatory tension. At his best, there’s a tendency towards the gothic in the incipient madness spilling over into delicately wrought melodrama in such works as Asylum , Spider and Dr Haggard’s Disease , but there has been a repetitiveness that has seen diminishing returns more lately in Trauma and Constance , albeit still with elegantly and beautifully crafted writing to enjoy. If that character is always present in his works, McGrath has worked a little outside his comfort zone in the US historical drama Martha Peake , in the exoticism of Port Mungo and – perhaps most successfully – in Ghost Town , his collection of three stories in different time period in a Manhattan setting. The Wardrobe Mistress extends McGrath’s range and

Shadow Man is a fairly standard police crime thriller although it’s a little bit better than most in as far as it provides a intriguing mystery and doesn’t cheat the reader with either a ridiculously over-the-top or an underwhelming ending. There are one or two other points of interest that give Margaret Kirk’s debut thriller a little more of an edge and some originality, principally being that it is set in Inverness around the time of the Scottish referendum. There are certainly divisions and divided loyalties expressed within families in Shadow Man , as well as some historical consideration of the nature of being Scottish, but it has to be said that this aspect remains largely in the background, and a first glance it doesn’t seem to have anything at all to do with the murder of Morvern Murray, a high-flying local TV celebrity who has been brutally eviscerated in her hotel room on the eve of her wedding. Social and professional rivalries look like being more of an issue here, thinks

Although there are a few unusual features, the mystery of a woman’s disappearance from her cottage in a little village outside Dublin isn’t a particularly complicated one, and despite the lead detective’s frustration, you can see where his superiors are coming from when the Irish police they decide to drop the case soon afterwards. There really isn’t much in the way of leads to follow, there’s no indication of abduction, no suspects and no body. To all intents and purposes, there’s no crime. But there are those unusual features… For a start, Lillian, the missing woman, has disappeared right before the eyes of her friend Orla, who is chatting to her at the time on a Skype call from London. Excited about her return to her home town in Ardgreevy where she is planning to get engaged to former rugby player Aidan and start out on a new business venture, Lillian interrupts the conversation to answer the door and never comes back. To Orla’s great horror, she then sees the house become engulfed