A novel of suspense set in Dublin that will keep you guessing until the end

A review of The Silver Swan, by Benjamin Black

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

The Booker Prize-winning Irish author John Banfield, aka Benjamin Black, writes a series of offbeat crime stories about a Dublin-based pathologist named Quirke. The Silver Swan is the second of the five novels he’s written to date. It’s also the first that I’ve read — and it won’t be the last.

Like many of the best crime writers, Black focuses on character, atmosphere, and language as much as on plot. The sure hand of a master stylist is very much in evidence in The Silver Swan. You’ll see it in the dialogue, where the individual speech patterns of his characters are distinctive, and in his lyrical descriptions of Dublin in the rain. If you read this book to the end, you might think you’ve gotten to know Quirke, and you may like him. You might also have a sense of Dublin, even if you’ve never been there.

In The Silver Swan, Quirke is approached by someone he knew (and disliked) at university with a strange request: presenting himself as an old friend, Billy Hunt asks Quirke not to do a postmortem on his young wife, Deirdre, who has apparently committed suicide by drowning herself in the ocean. Billy explains that he just couldn’t stand the thought that her beautiful body would be cut up by knives. For no particular reason — Quirke understands irrational impulses, his own among others — he has every intention of granting Billy’s wish until he discovers the puncture mark of a needle on the young woman’s arm. He’s forced to proceed — and learns, of course, that Deirdre was not a suicide.

In a more traditional crime novel, Quirke would probably join his colleagues in the police in a hunt for the killer, no doubt proving himself a far cleverer detective than the professionals. That’s not what transpires in The Silver Swan. Although he worked with a senior officer on another case (the subject of Black’s first crime novel, Quirke has no formal connection to the police, known as the Garda in Ireland. To prevent Billy Hunt from discovering what he has learned from the autopsy, Quirke lies to the Garda and lies on the stand in the coroner’s court, then undertakes his own, private investigation. This effort leads him into a troubling and complex set of interrelationships involving the murdered woman, her husband, her lover, and her lover’s husband, all the while he engages in a verbal minuet with the police inspector who understands perfectly well that Quirke had lied to him about the autopsy.

Oh, it’s a fine mess, in the best Irish tradition! This is a novel that’s likely to keep you guessing until the final pages.

The 10 best mysteries and thrillers I’ve read in 2012

1. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

This is the story of Amy Elliott Dunne and Nick Dunne, the perfect couple in the ideal marriage. It’s a storybook tale . . . or maybe it isn’t. One day Amy goes missing, and it slowly begins to dawn on you that one (or both) of the two is a sociopath. Gone Girl is plotted almost as diabolically as Catch 22. It’s near-perfect, with jaw-dropping shocks and shivers all the way to the very last page.

2. Agent 6, by Tom Rob Smith

The third book in a trilogy, Agent 6 concludes the story of Leo Demidov, a World War II hero and later an agent in Stalin’s secret police. The book opens in 1950 with Leo in thrall to the Sovet State, a senior officer in the MGB (predecessor to the KGB and to today’s FSB) charged with training newly recruited agents. Jesse Austin, a world-famous African-American singer closely resembling Paul Robeson, is visiting Moscow, where he will perform and publicly extol the accomplishments of the Soviet regime as he sees them. Leo is detailed to help ensure that Austin is shielded from the realities of life in Moscow.

3. The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, by Alexander McCall Smith

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection is the 13th and latest in Smith’s best-known series of novels about the #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Gaborone, the capital of the small, land-locked nation of Botswana, bordering South Africa. To my mind, it’s one of the best. As always, the story revolves around the lives of Mma (“Ms.”) Precious Ramotswe, founder and proprietor of the agency, and her consistently exasperating assistant, Mma Grace Makutsi.

4. The Midnight House, by Alex Berenson

The events that take place in 2008 in the Midnight House — a site in Poland where prisoners in the “war on terror” are interrogated and often tortured — are so explosive, and so shocking, that they lead to an upheaval in relations between the U.S. and Pakistan, end the career of a senior U.S. intelligence official, and spark a series of brutal murders. There’s nothing subtle about this gripping novel.

5. The Silent Oligarch, by Chris Morgan Jones

This finely crafted novel revolves around an obscure Russian bureaucrat named Konstantin Malin, a lifer in the Ministry of Oil and Industry who controls a large share of his country’s oil and gas industry, the world’s largest. His front man is an English expat lawyer in Moscow, Richard Lack, whose cozy life in Moscow begins coming apart when a Greek oilman, one of the many wealthy businessmen Malin has cheated, decides to unmask Malin’s fraud and put him out of business.

6. Mission to Paris, by Alan Furst

It is late in 1938, with Europe on the brink of war. With Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich and the tragedy of Kristallnacht unfolding in the background, an Austrian-born Hollywood film star named Fredric Stahl has come to Paris at the behest of Jack Warner to star on loan to Paramount Pictures in a war movie. The resolutely anti-Nazi Stahl finds himself targeted by Nazi operatives intent on enmeshing him in their propaganda machine.

7. Breakdown, by Sara Paretsky

Paretsky’s 14th V. I. Warshawski novel begins with seeming innocence with a gaggle of tweener girls dancing under the moonlight in an abandoned cemetery. Soon enough, however, we find ourselves enmeshed in the mysteries of some of Chicago’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens as well as a roomful of other indelibly drawn characters who illustrate Chicago at its best — and its worst.

8. 36 Yalta Boulevard, by Olen Steinhauer

The third novel in Olen Steinhauer’s outstanding Central European cycle is set in 1966-67. Brano Sev, a World War II partisan fighter turned secret policeman in an unnamed Soviet satellite country, has been exiled to work in a factory as punishment for an espionage scandal that erupted after he was sent on assignment to Vienna. Without warning, his superiors temporarily reinstate him as a major in the security service, and send him off to his home village, where he is to investigate why a defector has suddenly returned to the village and what he’s planning to do. The ensuing complications threaten not just to end Brano’s career but possibly his life as well.

9. The Ghosts of Belfast, by Stuart Neville

You may never have read a murder mystery like this one. The protagonist, Gerry Fegan, is a former hit man for the IRA responsible for the deaths of twelve people (the “ghosts” of the title), and it’s never much of a mystery when he begins killing again. The mystery lies deeper, somewhere in the vicinity of his stunted family life and the treacherous relationships among the others in his violence-prone faction. As Fegan reflects, “You can’t choose where you belong, and where you don’t. But what if the place you don’t belong is the only place you have left?”

10. Criminal, by Karin Slaughter

In every one of Karin Slaughter’s previous novels of murder and mayhem in the Deep South, Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) officer Will Trent and his boss, Amanda Wagner, GBI’s deputy commander, were characters shrouded in mystery, their actions frequently difficult to understand. In Criminal, Slaughter rips off the shrouds. This is an unusually suspenseful, affecting, and, in the end, deeply satisfying story.

Mental disorders on parade in this murder mystery set in Ireland today

A review of Broken Harbor, by Tana French

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

You probably wouldn’t like Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy, the Dublin homicide detective whose story dominates the psychological thriller Broken Harbor. Mick is 42, a grizzled veteran of Dublin’s toughest cases, whose high “solve rate” has long been the talk of the Murder Squad. He’s a tough guy, a loner, largely friendless, who rarely talks about himself; many find him arrogant. At work, Mick is a methodical, by-the-book detective who would never stoop to the shady workarounds of many of his colleagues — and as a result is detested more than admired. Recently, though, Mick screwed up a big case and was sidelined by the bosses. Now he has a chance to redeem himself with another serious, high-profile case: the mass murder of a family in a coastal town once called Broken Harbor.

Mick and Richie, his rookie partner, set out for Broken Harbor to examine the scene where Patrick Spain and his two young children lie dead, their mother, Jenny, on the verge of death in the ICU. It quickly becomes clear that the obvious explanation of what happened isn’t obvious at all. The case is full of unexplained circumstances, hidden clues, and contradictions which embroil the two detectives in a protracted investigation that threatens to end both their careers.

Tana French wrote Broken Harbor in Mick Kennedy’s voice, diving deeply into his own troubled family history, which, it turns out, is closely associated with the old town of Broken Harbor. French is a brilliant stylist and a perceptive observer of human behavior. She’s able to hold the reader’s attention through lengthy passages of soul-searching dialogue, because the clues to this case lie as much in the words spoken and written as in the physical evidence.

Here’s Mick, musing on the changes in Irish society: “Wild got into the air like a virus, and it’s spreading. Watch the packs of kids roaming inner-city estates, mindless and brakeless as baboons, looking for something or someone to wreck. Watch the businessmen shoving past pregnant women for a seat on the train, using their 4x4s to force smaller cars out of their way, purple-faced and outraged when the world dares to contradict them. Watch the teenagers throw screaming stamping tantrums when, for once, they can’t have it the second they want it. Everything that stops us being animals is eroding, washing away like sand, going and gone.”

Mick again, in the desolation of the unfinished “luxury” housing estate that once was Broken Harbor: “It looked like the end of the world. I half-expected feral dogs to slink up around the car when I stopped, last survivors to come staggering and moaning out of skeleton houses.”

This novel transcends the boundaries of the mystery genre by painting a vivid picture of Ireland after the recent crash, which impoverished millions of the Irish middle class and left the countryside littered with half-finished housing developments and high-rises. The murders themselves, and the circumstances of the Spain family that preceded them, bring life (and death) to this scene.

Broken Harbor is Tana French’s fourth novel featuring the cases — and the neuroses — of the detectives who form the fictional Dublin Murder Squad. The Irish-American theatrical actor launched her literary career in her 30s with the publication of In the Woods, to great acclaim, awards, and large sales. This was followed by Faithful Place (previously reviewed here) and Likeness.

I’m certain I would have enjoyed Broken Harbor as much as I did Tana French’s previous books if it weren’t for a certain &^$%^ book reviewer at The New York Times who revealed major elements of the plot. I had  the misfortune of reading her review when I had barely started reading the book. Grrrrrrr!

A grim story of war and betrayal in Northern Ireland

A review of The Ghosts of Belfast, by Stuart Neville

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

You may never have read a murder mystery like this one. The protagonist, Gerry Fegan, is a former hit man for the IRA responsible for the deaths of twelve people (the “ghosts” of the title), and it’s never much of a mystery when he begins killing again. The mystery lies deeper, somewhere in the vicinity of his stunted family life and the treacherous relationships among the others in his violence-prone faction.

As Fegan reflects, “You can’t choose where you belong, and where you don’t. But what if the place you don’t belong is the only place you have left?”

The “detective,” Davy Campbell, a Scottish paramilitary officer who has lived underground with the IRA for many years, is a killer himself. The contest of wits and physical prowess between these two pawns in the grip of history unfolds against a background of political corruption and betrayal in Northern Ireland. The action takes place following the Good Friday Agreement that laid to rest — presumably for all time — decades of intercommunal violence between Protestants and Catholics.

The Ghosts of Belfast is skillfully written. His characters are all too believable, all the more so for their profound cynicism and greed for power and money — to my mind, a principal reason for the unending violence in Northern Ireland. No one comes off well in Neville’s story, not Fegan and Campbell, and not the men who manipulate them. I suspect that anyone who witnesses sectarian violence first-hand anywhere in the world might feel the same about the central actors on both sides of the wars they observe.

Stuart Neville is a young Northern Irish writer who achieved instant acclaim for The Ghosts of Belfast, the first of his four novels. The book was nominated for numerous awards, winning the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

A brilliant and satisfying novel of suspense

A review of Faithful Place, by Tana French

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Novels of crime and suspense generally fall into two categories. There are those written by hacks, strictly to make a buck. From time to time, those books can be diverting, or at least temporarily distracting, but they’re rarely anything more than that. Faithful Place by Tana French falls into the other category. It’s brilliantly written, with flair and an obvious love for the sounds and the cadence of authentic spoken language. It’s carefully plotted. And its characters are finely drawn — emotionally complex, engaged in wholly credible relationships with one another, and fully human.

Faithful Place tells the story of Frank Mackey, the middle son in a poor Dublin family of five children who is forced by circumstances to return to the home and family he hasn’t visited in more than two decades. Frank is a police detective. He quickly finds himself caught up in an investigation into the murder of Rosie Daly, the 19-year-old neighbor he was scheduled to elope with to England but who disappeared the night of their planned departure. The investigation, and Frank’s interaction with his parents and siblings, bring to light all over again the profound ugliness of the environment in which he grew up.

Faithful Place is Tana French’s third novel. Her first, In the Woods, won an instant following and several literary awards. The second, The Likeness, suffered from an overly great resemblance to In the Woods. With this third effort, the 37-year-old Irish actress has put all the pieces together. Faithful Place works on every level: as a suspenseful detective novel, as a psychological study of a horribly dysfunctional family, as a portrait of class relations in contemporary Ireland, and as an excursion into working-class Irish dialect.

ISBN-10: 0670021873

ISBN-13: 978-0670021871

ASIN: B003NX764O