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There is a promising group of new Northern Irish crime writers daring now to write crime fiction that is based in the province, but some are more willing than others to tackle the thorny subject of the legacy of the Troubles and the impact they have on how crime is seen and investigated in that part of the world. And for good reason. It's still a sensitive subject and understandably, not every writer wants to look backward, preferring to focus on other contemporary issues, like domestic abuse and the treatment of women in society. Sharon Dempsey however manages in Who Took Eden Mulligan? to deal with the past from a contemporary perspective, and consider how much of the legacy of the past plays into the current day. It's brilliantly done. Sometimes it helps to have an outside perspective to make sense of the strange ways of Northern Ireland. Not an entirely outside perspective, as even most people even in the rest of the UK don't know what to make of this place, but someon...

The Hitchcock references aren't hard to spot in The House Across the Lake , principally Rear Window. It serves of course to generate a highly effective tried and tested atmosphere of menace, but Riley Sager sets out an intriguing, dark situation of his own for Casey Fletcher and her relationship with the house and the people across on the other side of the sinister Lake Greene in Vermont. Casey is a former actress and daughter of a famous star (with a sister called Marnie moreover) who has been living there alone since the death of her husband Len in a fishing accident on the lake 14 months ago. Drinking heavily, Casey's life spiralled out of control after that until she was sacked from a Broadway Hitchcock-like murder thriller called 'Shred of Doubt'. She now spends her days looking over the lake at the glass-fronted luxury home of former supermodel Katherine Royce, who is married to tech giant Tom Royce. That's how she manages to prevent the lake claiming another ...

There's no reason why a crime thriller based in Northern Ireland should be any different from a thriller based in any other part of the UK, but aside from the locations and geography, Kerry Buchanan doesn't seem to make the most of the opportunities for the two PSNI detectives in her first Harvey and Birch thriller series. Regardless of whether the nature of the case of serial killer abductions in Knife Edge  might not be the kind of crime we traditionally associate with the province, it doesn't seem as if the author really develops or makes the most of the unique circumstances of working as police officers in the Police Service of Northern Ireland in this first novel of her series. Purely in terms of it being a dark crime thriller however, Knife Edge certainly sets out to live up to its title. Nic Gordon is a young woman who has suffered a horrendous experience at the hands of a vicious killer. She and her friend Colm had been abducted at a Belfast club where their drinks...

Published in France, but not yet in the UK or the US, Baptism  ( Senrei ) is a later work from Kazuo Umezz (Umezu in France), the author/artist of the 1974 end of the world monster horror epic The Drifting Classroom . Created in 1995, Baptism is also a little more refined and paced while still retaining the character of Umezz's classic manga art style. Just as importantly, the story also manages to take a classic horror trope as its basis and do something entirely different with it; a Frankenstein-like science experiment, a body-swap horror that has a typically sinister twist. A famous movie actress from the olden days, Izumi Wakakusa has retired at the height of her career, terrified that the make-up she wears will no longer be able to mask the horrible disfigurement that she bears down one side of her face. She leaves the world of cinema and becomes a mother, devoted to her daughter Sakura. In fact, she may even be a little over-protective. We soon find out why. The only reason ...

Such is her convincing exploration of the criminal psychology and mindset that it's almost impossible to imagine a thriller written from the point of view of the con artist and the fraudster that doesn't bear the influence of Patricia Highsmith. Some works show that influence more openly but few do it as fearlessly, and few measure up to the standard set by the true Queen of Crime. The Talented Mr Ripley is perhaps one of the most admired and imitated books in this field, and its influence is evident to such an extent in the setting and situation for the opening of Sabine Durrant's Sun Damage that it almost comes across as an open homage. The question is whether Durrant can be just as fearless as Highsmith and take it in her own direction. You suspect not, but really is there anyone who can compete or compare with Highsmith on those terms? Despite the similarities, the opening of Sun Damage is nonetheless promising and engages you quickly in the schemes and operations of...

You get to know a lot about people during a crime investigation, particularly when the crime involves a missing person. When it's a child who has gone missing the police need to know as much about the child as soon as possible, and that's where you find out a lot about the parents as well. It's not just what they tell, there's just as much that can be revealed by what they aren't telling. What exactly that tells you, other than when something doesn't ring true, is what the investigator really needs to find out. In The Sleeping Season , Kelly Creighton's first DI Sloane thriller, matters can potentially be complicated by the location. You would think there's no reason why Belfast should be any different from any other part of the UK, but evidently things are different here, and people can have their reasons for keeping things quiet. It's true however that even the idea of a child going missing, potentially abducted, is itself something rare in Belfast...

Malniveau Prison , the first in a trilogy of books that come under the title of The Twenty-Year Death, is a curious book. It's not one of the hard-boiled noir classics that Hard Case Crime do a wonderful service in reviving, but one of their more modern publications supposedly in the classic style. While some of the newer models can definitely still evoke the greats - and Ariel S Winter has received praise in some quarters for his writing - it doesn't really cut it for me, lacking any of the real literary or underlying social commentary that can often be found even in pulp fiction, lacking even any real character of its own. Even as a crime thriller, I found Malniveau Prison curiously unengaging in its style and in its plot. Even though it involves a relative small cast of characters, it's all over the place, not really sure of where it wants to take you. It starts out on one direction, leaves matters curiously uninvestigated and then moves on to relate other bizarre event...