To The Last Page

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...

You shouldn’t ever confuse an author with his characters, otherwise I imagine you would find Stephen King a very disturbed individual and, judging by how many serial killers operate in the crime fiction genre, you’d need to be wary about attending too many writing festivals, conventions and book signings. I’d even give J K Rowling a wide berth, just to be on the safe side. I’m fairly sure however that Roger Keen is a nice guy, but you can never know for certain. I mean, how can you really know what goes on in the mind of a writer who imagines indulging in the stalking and brutal murder of critics, so-called friends and literary associates who he believes have ignored and slighted him over the years? Someone who not only imagines killing people in meticulous detail, but who seems to have put an awful lot of research into it. All for the sake of literature of course. Nick Chatterton (or should that be Roger Keen) not only indulges in such fantasies in Literary Stalker but he also sets a...

Jane Harper’s debut suspense thriller The Dry was a good way of delving into the personal background of her Australian police detective Aaron Falk, even if it didn’t really relate to his area of expertise in an AFP agent investigating financial crime and tended to fall back on some unconvincing crime thriller conventions at its conclusion. Force of Nature , Harper’s follow-up to The Dry , integrates much better the crime angle, the financial investigation, Falk’s local knowledge and family background and the nature of the challenges faced in conducting a crime investigation in the remote and dangerous areas of the Australian bushland. And more besides. Force of Nature is a much more confident and assured piece of writing from an author who is establishing her own very distinctive field here. Tourists and hikers often get lost in the Giralang Ranges bushland, and even ‘Corporate Retreat’ team-building exercises can run into problems, but something goes very wrong with one such expedit...

Ann Leckie made a big splash with her galaxy spanning Imperial Radch trilogy of books, the first of the series, Ancilliary Justice , winning Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards. Provenance , the author’s first standalone book outside the series is nonetheless set in the same Radchaai universe, but although political matters, conspiracies and diplomatic incidents related to the Radch and other the alien races play an important part in what occurs, the new book is not an expansive space opera, but something more of a science-fiction murder-mystery comedy. The person who inadvertently finds themselves at the centre of a potentially major diplomatic incident is Ingray Aughskold, the foster-daughter of Netano Aughskold, a District Representative in the Third Assembly on Hwae with ambitions to rise higher to Prolocutor. Ingray is in competition with her foster-brother Danach to win the favour of her mother and be appointed her heir, but she knows her intelligent, devious brother has a m...

With his second novel Stephen Burke’s subject of interest appears to be more readily identified, but The Reluctant Contact expands on and shows greater refinement of the historical and political content seen in his debut novel The Good Italian . Even though they come at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the common theme of both novels seems to be around the incompatibility of adapting a political or ideological utopia to real human sentiments. It’s the human element however that is more tightly focussed in The Reluctant Contact , but the espionage side is also convincingly handled in the novel’s Cold War thriller situation. In contrast to The Good Italian , where the subject was love in the time of fascism, set in 1935 in Mussolini-era Italian occupied Eritrea, The Reluctant Contact is about love in a colder climate; in 1977 in a Soviet mining post on the Norwegian Svalbard Archipelago. Pyramiden is a model outpost that operates very much to the ideals of communism, and despit...