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Jo Spain has widened her range of crime thrillers beyond Ireland. It was the US last time in The Perfect Lie , and she now takes us to another extreme entirely, to the sparsely populated door to the Arctic that is Lapland, Finland. Sparsely populated perhaps but it attracts large numbers of tourists and not just in the Christmas season. People come there for expensive luxury holidays, for adventure holidays, just to get a sense of living life on the edge while enjoying the comforts of the warm hospitality. Like anywhere else however, there is no escape from crime and murder, and despite the location, the motivations aren't all that different to those we've seen in Jo Spain's Tom Reynolds series and standalone Irish thrillers. What is also not all that different is Spain's method of crime writing and investigation. She's not afraid of making figures a little more complex and less sympathetic than we are accustomed to: it's not just good people who die at the han...

You don’t ever have to worry about whether you’ll find it difficult to get into a new Jo Spain thriller; she will have you gripped and intrigued from the start and The Perfect Lie is no exception. Right from the start we see Erin Kennedy’s life fall apart, shockingly and unexpectedly in a dramatic fashion. Erin is an Irish girl now living in America working for a publishing house and married to a police officer Danny in the Newport PD. Not only did she witness his suicide, which is horrific enough, and then find out that he was under investigation by his own force, but it seems that she is now also on trial for the murder of her husband. How can it have come to this? So you will definitely be hooked from the thrilling and shocking start, but still, a crime thriller set in the USA and within the American criminal justice system is quite a departure for Jo Spain. Or is it really entirely new ground? Certainly Spain’s previous work has all been very much related to Ireland, to the specif...

Usually in a typical crime thriller there’s a mystery at the start that has you intrigued and keep you reading, but with Jo Spain ( The Boy Who Fell , Sleeping Beauties ) the situation also invites the reader to have something of empathy or concern either about a victim or perhaps someone wrongly accused. With Six Wicked Reasons , Spain seems to take more of a risk and break from convention, choosing instead to present the reader with a victim who you don’t much care about and six siblings of a wealthy family who you quickly find are just as difficult to like, each of them with a good wicked reason why they might have killed their father Frazer Lattimer. The Lattimer siblings have all gone their separate ways and been mostly estranged from each other over the years, their lives (and personal enmities and problems) taking them in other directions. Something however has happened to bring them back together. Adam who had vanished 10 years ago has returned from the dead and their father Fr...

In Jo Spain’s fifth DCI Tom Reynolds book the Irish police detective may have bitten off more than he can chew, taken a decision on something that there’s no going back on, will have to face the consequences of that choice and live with it. He has agreed to take on the responsibility of the role of Chief Superintendent of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation. That might not seem as big an issue as some of the deeper problems and attitudes ingrained in Irish society that Spain has had him come up against in previous cases, but the rigid inflexibility and old-boy’s network of the upper echelons of the police service who look after friends and influential people in corrupt institutions means he will have his work cut out for him in the future. In fact, the only reason Tom has taken on the promotion is that it gives him a chance to correct that perception and rid the force of its self-serving network of conservatism and bureaucracy. As if to give Tom (and the reader) some indicati...

One thing you can be sure of in a Jo Spain novel is indeed the uncovering of dirty little secrets, although in her DI Tom Reynolds series the guilty secrets are more likely to be not so little, often revealing a dark side to Irish history and society that has been long kept hidden. Spain’s second standalone novel (after the thrilling The Confession ) gives the author the opportunity to delve into other perhaps more familiar and universally recognisable human motivations that give rise to crime in Dirty Little Secrets , but of course Jo Spain has her own very distinctive take on the subject that opens up other issues related to living in a small isolated community. So many in fact that – like any good crime thriller – there are any number of possible suspects who may have killed Olive Collins. There are only six houses in the exclusive Withered Vale gated community in Wicklow, but it’s taken 3 months for any of the neighbours to notice that Olive has been lying dead and decomposing in N...

Jo Spain used to work as a party advisor for the Irish Parliament, and she clearly brings her awareness of Irish social issues to bear on her crime writing. In her Tom Reynolds novels much of the criminal activity in Ireland tends to have its roots in the country’s social background where the Roman Catholic Church has had a major influence on morals, attitudes and behaviours. There’s a sense of moral outrage in the series at the impact that this has had on ordinary people, on young people, on anyone who doesn’t ‘fit in’. This has resulted in abuse, in hiding away problems, the sins compounded by cover-ups that only allow other abuses and crimes to be committed. As the title indicates, The Darkest Place refers to another national scandal that is gradually being brought to light, but this time I’m not entirely convinced that Jo Spain’s writing really does the subject justice. The subject of historical scandal and abuse alluded to in The Darkest Place is similar to the one of the Magdal...

In some respects Sleeping Beauties is a fairly run-of-the-mill serial-killer case that doesn’t have anything new or imaginative to add to the text-book psychology and psychopathology of the killer or to the police investigation methods used to track him down. There is however one crucial difference that sets Jo Spain’s book apart from the rest and it’s a feature that is really the dominant theme in a her DI Tom Reynolds books; it’s another means of exploring deeper, hidden aspects of Irish society that many would prefer remained unacknowledged and forgotten. In Sleeping Beauties , Spain’s third DI Tom Reynolds book, five bodies have been discovered buried in the beauty spot of Glendalough in Co. Wicklow. It’s soon apparent that the bodies are of young single women who have been abducted as year apart, kept alive for some time and then strangled. That in itself makes the killer quite dangerous, but what is even more disturbing is that he appears to be targeting vulnerable women of a c...

" If there's one thing I've learned with age, it's that if you scratch hard enough, nobody is good all the way through. Given the right, or wrong, circumstances, most people are capable of bad deeds ". The above quote from a character in her new novel summarises very well what looks like it is going to be Jo Spain's main area of interest and intrigue in her Inspector Tom Reynolds mystery series.  Reynolds' first investigation, With Our Blessing , lifted the lid on aspects of the infamous Magdalene laundries and her second novel in the series, Beneath the Surface , suggests that there are many other bad deeds to be uncovered beneath the seemingly respectable surface of Irish society, history and politics. Politics would seem to be at the forefront of the investigation into the killing of a Minister's PA in Leinster House, but inevitably, there are deeper secrets and other motivations at play here. Ryan Finnegan has been shot dead in a corridor of Leinst...