Hauntingly Delicious Irish Crime Fiction: THE TRAVELLER AND OTHER STORIES, Stuart Neville

Devouring and pondering the character-rich crime novels from Stuart Neville has been a delight since his debut in 2009 with The Ghosts of Belfast. Not only does he give us criminals and investigators torn by their loyalties and losses, but he evokes the abiding presence of The Troubles — Ireland's violent internal war — as a force that nurtures long-term resentment, revenge, and personal damage. When his characters brush up against an opposite force such as redemption, it's often with a raised shoulder or calloused fingers.

After interrupting this string of powerful novels with a couple of thrillers in a different direction (under the nom-de-plume Haylen Beck), Neville returns this season to his earlier characters and scenes in THE TRAVELLER AND OTHER STORIES. Of course, of course, this author must have written short fiction along the way, but it's been less visible. Now the stories are gathered for easy access, along with a hitherto-unpublished novella, The Traveller. In his introduction, Neville notes that it is 

a response to the messages I've received over the years asking what happened to Jack Lennon and his daughter, Ellen, after the events of The Final Silence. Although I've always known exactly where Jack wound up—the coastal village of Cushenden, working as a security guard—I'd put off writing about it for several years This collection  offered the opportunity to finally put that right, as well as tie up several loose ends, including the eponymous villain coming back to take his revenge.

Each of the dozen shorter tales offers insight into other characters, suspense and delight in the reading, and a sideways squint into the author's diverse interests. "The Last Dance," following up on the life of Gerry Fegan from The Ghosts of Belfast, is a great gift to Neville's regular readers.

If you want to give friends an unexpected and highly memorable trick-or-treat, get a couple of extra copies of this collection. Make sure to ink your name into your own copy, so it won't walk away lightly. It will be, indeed, haunted.

[Released this week from Soho Crime, an imprint of Soho Press, with a fascinating foreword by the remarkable John Connolly.]

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Irish Noir and Heartbreak in SILENCE, Anthony Quinn

The arrival of an "international" mystery on the American market can be a mystery in itself. Irish bestselling author Anthony Quinn isn't well known -- yet -- on this side of the Atlantic, but thanks to the partnership of the Mysterious Press (Otto Penzler's creation) and Open Road Media (!), Quinn's third in his Inspector Celcius Daly series, SILENCE, is now available here.

What a great Irish police investigation! Inspector Daly is in the confusing passage of midlife as a police officer in Ireland, where "The Troubles" are supposed to be over and recovered from -- including a posh new headquarters for the police force in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In fact, policing is supposed to be free of the past, and highly professional. But Daly, in many ways a traditional police detective, isn't sure why Special Branch is housed in the same new building. Still, when Special Branch shows up at a car crash that Daly's investigating, he's sure there are powerful disclosures ahead about the victim, Father Aloysius Walsh.

What Daly doesn't expect is a personal involvement in the investigation. Father Walsh, he soon discovers, had been investigating a set of nearby murders that took place in the heyday of The Troubles, and the map of killings includes the family home where Daly still resides, alone, as his parents are dead and he really has no other personal life around him. Living in this monument to vanished parents becomes nearly intolerable when Father Walsh's murder map reveals Daly's own, unknowing role in the horrors of the past.

First, though, he'll need to try to understand the victim, this priest sprawled in a crushed car that's somehow flown off the road by some traffic cones, and into disaster.

He looked unhappy to have ended up like this, a grisly spectacle of motoring misdirection.

However, the most poignant element of the scene lay in the strange object the dead man gripped in his right hand. Daly narrowed the beam on to the stiffened fingers, which were wrapped around an untidy braid of children's rosary beads and holy medals, strands of charms tied up with wisps of broken string. He stared at this twisted pigtail of religious effects and wondered what significance they had for the dead priest. Did they represent a cry for spiritual assistance, or something more sinister? ...

The more Daly looked at the strange bundle, the more it spoke to him of something more personal: his own religion. ... He still felt the soothing power of the Church's symbols, the rosary beads and the miraculous medals, and he worried that if he removed them completely from his life, he might find himself pulled down a tapering funnel into a deeper darkness. 

In this third in the Inspector Daly series, Daly finds his sanity and his job on the line, as well as his life. Here's a tightly plotted and psychologically compelling crime novel of "today's Northern Ireland" -- and it turns out that The Troubles are far from over.

Highly recommended, even if the author does slip into a momentary jest about the crime fiction of the leader of today's Irish noir, Stuart Neville. (Watch for that moment.) Quinn's awards and nominations are quickly piling up; it's time to catch up with, and enjoy, his evocative and well-paced writing.

Depths of Evil, Roots of Crime, in THOSE WE LEFT BEHIND, Stuart Neville

Stuart Neville is the master of "Belfast Noir," gritty crime fiction set in and around Belfast, Northern Ireland. The port city is a living memorial to "The Troubles" -- the political and religious fever that drove Neville's earlier series, where violence kept emerging in successive family generations, responding to the horrors and repression of the 20th century (which, let's face it, were rooted in turn in the "Potato Famine" oppression).

In THOSE WE LEFT BEHIND, Neville forsakes his series and its close ties to recent history. Instead, through two powerful women in law enforcement and a pair of very damaged brothers, he probes the nature of evil and the way it spreads. The contagion of the murder committed by 12-year-old Ciaran Devine and his older brother Thomas has infected DCI Serena Flanagan, who received Ciaran's confession eight years earlier.

Flanagan's never quite believed the confession, though. Maternal instincts, perhaps? The young foster child seemed too vulnerable, too much manipulated by his darker brother. And it's clear to Flanagan that Ciaran's insistence on being the only killer of the boys' foster father -- leaving Thomas as accomplice -- has saved Thomas from a lengthy prison sentence and made sure that Ciaran's own was "just" the eight years assigned to a child.

Flanagan's kept her doubts close to her chest. But that, in turn, has festered: Her return to police work at the same time of Ciaran's release from prison is a return from radiation treatment for breast cancer. Although she's not especially introspective, Neville leaves little doubt that Flanagan's urge to pull young Ciaran -- now a hormonally confused young man -- to her breast may be a toxic mistake.

Then there's Paula Cunningham, the dedicated Probation Service officer who'll escort Ciaran out of prison and into the monitored life ahead of him.

Cunningham had entered the Probation Service twelve years ago ... As a postgraduate student, she had spent summers working on the wards of psychiatric units, then a year in Maghaberry prison, counselling inmates. She had learned things in those days that would stay with her until her last breath, like the terrible cost of casual violence, and how poorly the system dealt with those who inflicted it.

But was the action of the Devine boys casual violence, or was it planned revenge? And what revenge may the surviving family member of that long-ago foster household desire?

While the twisted menace of Ciaran and Thomas is a meticulous portrait of how abuse can blossom as violence, Neville's compelling investigation of what drives DCI Flanagan becomes the counterstroke of the plot.

Flanagan had seen many murder scenes. The ugliness of the act, the indignity of it. ... Sudden and violent death rarely visited those with stable lives, with loving families, with purpose to their days. More often than not, murder happened on drunken nights between friends brought together by their mutual dependencies, petty arguments exploding into bloodshed, kitchen knives buried in throats, heads cracked open by heavy objects. No planning, no intent, only rage unleashed.

But this was different.

Flanagan's effort to get Ciaran to tell the truth involves showing him that he can survive without being a puppet of his malicious older brother. But by threatening the bond of the brothers, Flanagan unleashes a tide of rage and violence against all the people around them -- especially these two women in law enforcement. Is it worth it? How good are her instincts? What evidence can there be, or what subsequent admissions?

Don't look for quintessential "Irishness" in this one -- aside from the scraps of Belfast language and the slightly different criminal justice system, THOSE WE LEFT BEHIND could take place in any harsh urban environment, even in a suburb. And that broad application, coupled with relentless insight into abuse and its consequences, is what makes this book an instant classic of crime and investigation.

There's a rumor that Flanagan will be a series character herself. That's good news: Stuart Neville's decision to confront crime's long roots may benefit us all. And to publisher Soho Crime, again -- thanks.

Psychological Suspense: THE DOLL'S HOUSE, Louise Phillips (Ireland)

Louise Phillips is a best-selling author in Ireland; it may take a while, in the current flood of imported crime fiction, for American readers to catch up with her. After her dark and complex debut with Red Ribbons, Hachette Ireland now offers her second book, THE DOLL'S HOUSE, to the U.S. market, in softcover.

Forget any notion of Ibsen or other dollhouse images -- in this case, a young woman, Clodagh Hamilton -- that's her maiden name, but it's the important one -- is struggling to hold onto her newly gained sobriety, while her husband batters her both emotionally and physically, and her desperate search for sanity forces her to investigate the long-ago family issues around the death of her father, Adrian Hamilton. Accident, or something more sinister? And why did her mother stop loving her, when she was just seven years old?

When Clodagh enlists a hypnotherapist to help part the clouds of the past, her frightening gains of memory turn her into a target for the forces of the past. As the plot lines tangle, it's clear that the only chance there is for Clodagh's survival will depend on criminal psychologist Dr Kate Pearson catching up with related deaths and motives, in time to reach the truth.

And the doll's house? That's the one from Clodagh's childhood -- the one where, each time she regresses to the past, the dolls take on personalities and sharp voices that warn and threaten. Sure, the voices are those of her own past ... but which ones can she trust, and which are childhood misunderstandings or malicious misleading?

The pace is tight, the emotions piercing, and the connections between Clodagh and Kate -- whom we've met in Red Ribbons and whose own life is rapidly fracturing around the end of a relationship -- turn out to be both significant and suspenseful. The clock is ticking, and there's reason to believe that destruction and abuse are multiplying.

No, there's nothing particularly "Irish" to this crime novel -- it's built on clearly inked characters, not on the history or traditions of the Emerald Isle -- yet the chilling criminal maneuvers subtly echo the evil that, say, Stuart Neville taps into so readily. Everything here depends on Clodagh and Kate. Struggling with them through the action, readers know exactly how vulnerable each one is. Does the perpetrator know this, also?

Author website here: http://www.louise-phillips.com.

Brief Mention: Dave Zelterserman, THE BOY WHO KILLED DEMONS; Graham Masterton, BROKEN ANGELS

Dave Zeltserman is a master of dark fiction -- the "noir" -- and his mysteries have powerful ties to Boston's underworld of mobsters and contract killers. His horror fantasy novels, though, come in distinctly different forms. I still haven't shaken the mingled chill and pity that I felt as I finished reading his The Caretaker of Lorne Field in 2010; every time I tangle with an overgrown section of my garden, I feel the nightmare of that story all over again.

This season, Zeltserman's new offering, THE BOY WHO KILLED DEMONS, looks like it might become the first in a series, judging by few threads at the finale. Narrated by 13-year-old Henry Dudlow, it's an investigation of how demons have invaded the world, with ominous intent. And this struggling teen, half smothered by his thoroughly unlikeable parents but lifted out of the mess via friends and his first girlfriend, has a terrible gift and responsibility that have arrived with puberty: He alone, among the people he talks with, can see the demons in their real and menacing form. They're after him, of course. And when he realizes what their goals are, not to mention how they pursue them, he knows he has to stop them.

If you know a teen who's already read a lot of Stephen King, and laps up horror and funky sex as if these were breakfast cereal, you might want to share this book with that teen. Otherwise, keep it for yourself (provided you, too, are a horror fan!) and enjoy the journey back to your own teens, as you keep Henry company.

Because I'm intrigued by the stream of Irish noir flowing across the Atlantic, I tackled the newly released US paperback version of Graham Masterton's BROKEN ANGELS. [This is the second in the series that began with A Terrible Beauty, later retitled White Bones.] Here too, terror and the grotesque are lined up, as Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire in County Cork heads up an investigation into the murder of a priest. The mutilation of the corpse -- well, actually it happened before death -- convinces almost all the detectives that the killing is revenge for child abuse inflicted by the priest, who'd been a target of unpleasant accusations. But as the death count and mutilations mount, Katie becomes convinced there's a larger and even more unpleasant reason for the string of murders.

I won't go into more detail -- partly to avoid spoilers, and partly because there's a lot of mixing of sex and sadistic violence here, some of which is truly horrifying (but no surprise to readers who may already have tracked Masterton's powerful but frightening narratives; he's a well-established author in Europe). This one's not for traditional mystery fans, but only for those who don't suffer nightmares or PTSD or loss of appetite among such horrors. Count on a fast pace, believable twists, and an investigator worth admiring. But also, consider yourself warned.