If you go down to the woods today, be sure not to accidentally kill a woman who belongs to an inbred community that lives beyond the reach of the law.
Adrian McKinty's thriller-cum-dark-fairytale The Island (Orion, £12.99) opens with American tourists Heather and Tom, and Tom's teenage kids Owen and Olivia, visiting Dutch Island, a small island off the coast of Australia, where Tom's erratic driving results in a fatal accident. When Tom compounds the tragedy by trying to escape on the ferry, the family who have made the island their home for generations set out to hunt down the interlopers and exact a terrible revenge.
The novel was inspired, as McKinty says in his acknowledgements, by his own experience of “a Deliverance moment in real life”, but The Island, although framed as a hunter-and-hunted thriller, offers much to unpack as McKinty draws upon a variety of sources – from The Island of Dr Moreau to the Lord of the Flies – as he returns to a setting that recalls his underrated novel The Sun is God (2014).
Not content with that, McKinty also flips the traditional thriller narrative: our sympathies may initially lie with Heather and Tom as they are pursued with lethal intent, but there’s no getting away from the fact that they are loathed by the natives as the kind of “white fellas” who believe they can go where they want, and do what they want, without considering the consequences.
Ultimately, the novel functions as a modern folk-tale, or cautionary fable: “There were no monsters on Dutch Island,” Heather tells us, “but the beast was man, had always been man.”
McKinty’s most recent offering, The Chain (2019), was as successful as its plot was improbable; with The Island, he gives us a novel that has all the expected thrills and spills, but also marks a return to the lyrical prose and philosophical musings that set him apart from most of his peers.
A tale of twin compulsions
EV Kelly's debut Her Last Words (Quercus, £12.99) opens with a terrific hook when Cassandra, waiting to collect her husband Jeff from his morning swim, witnesses him commit murder on the beach. It's quite the quandary: with her young son Ted in the back of the car, the shocked Cassandra is unable to immediately confront Jeff about what he has done; besides, Jeff seemed to be very intimate with his victim before things turned ugly. What should Cassandra do?
Matters get further complicated when Kelly then introduces her second narrator, film-school graduate Nina, whose story, which begins roughly a year previous to the murder on the beach, centres on her obsession with Jeff. What follows is an unsettling account of an easily avoidable tragedy, told as a kind of hallucinatory fever-dream that seems to move forward with the fitful jerks of a nightmare’s narrative.
It’s a tale of twin compulsions, or derangements, and one that employs a deliciously skewed logic and a rather irritating number of minor cliffhangers to deliver a compelling and challenging thriller.
A 21st-century Jesse James
Ructions by name, ructions by nature: Richard O'Rawe's debut Northern Heist (2018) featured the ex-IRA man James "Ructions" O'Hare, and the charismatic bank robber returns in another flamboyant caper in Goering's Gold (Melville House, £12.99).
Four years on from his previous outing, Ructions – now living the good life in exile in France – is still in bad odour with the IRA, who were blamed for looting £36 million from Belfast’s National Bank. But when the opportunity arises to stake a claim to the billions in gold bullion Herman Goering stashed in Ireland at the end of the second World War, Ructions can’t resist, even if it means “running rings around Europe’s top police officers, the IRA and a phalanx of German neo-Nazis”.
More high-concept than Northern Heist, which was rooted in Northern Ireland’s post-Troubles scuffle for power and prestige, Goering’s Gold’s entertaining but highly improbable scenario sets out to establish Ructions O’Hare as “a 21st-century Jesse James”. In this it largely succeeds, even if O’Rawe, in transforming Ructions into a combination of Raffles and Danny Ocean, sacrifices the whiff of sulphur that gave Northern Heist its distinctive appeal.
Dry take on the spy novel
Johnny Gogan's Station to Station (Lepus Print, €13) opens on Station Island in Lough Derg, where the former Irish diplomat Jack Lennon has travelled to make something of a last stand. Jack, we learn, was once a poet who somehow inveigled his way into the ranks of the Irish diplomatic corps; dispatched to Spain at the height of the Celtic Tiger boom, Jack found himself operating "more at the arse-wiping than the intellectual end of the Diplomatic Service".
When the visiting Minister for the Marine and professional cute hoor John Paul Grealish anoints Don Patricio O’Reilly – a descendant of the “Wine Geese” – an honorary consul, all hell breaks loose, and things go from bad to worse when Jack discovers that O’Reilly is in cahoots with the last remnants of those Nazis who fled to Franco’s Spain post-1945.
What follows is a delightfully dry take on the spy novel – while John le Carré’s spies operate along Moscow Rules, Irish diplomats follow Lambay Rules, according to which anything that happens east of Lambay Island is fair game – and Jack Lennon is terrific company as he goes ricocheting around southern Spain as a self-styled “Don Quixote on another wild goose chase”.
A quietly blistering J’accuse
Winnie M Li's Complicit (Orion, £12.99) is a curious crime novel in that the crime, or crimes, happen off-stage – indeed, and as the title suggests, the main victim, the associate film producer Sandra Lai, comes to consider herself the guilty party.
“A child of Hong Kong immigrants,” Sandra grew up dreaming of a career in filmmaking; but when she finally gets to Hollywood, the American Dream becomes her worst nightmare as Sandra – along with a number of young women – find themselves at the mercy of billionaire investor and serial predator Hugo North.
Li, awarded an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland in 2018 for her advocacy of women’s rights, has crafted a spellbinding novel that transcends the immediacy of its #MeToo backdrop to deliver a broadside against the movie industry and the patriarchal system it embodies, in which sexism, racism and predatory behaviour are not only not called out, but celebrated and rewarded.
Sandra isn’t blind to her own faults as she makes her way up the slippery ladder – she thrills to “the illusion of power, or at least the thrill of having that illusion in place” – but there are two kinds of crime in play here. The first, and most obvious, is the horrific abuse of vulnerable people; the second, and arguably the more insidious, is in persuading the victim that she is complicit in, and therefore guilty of, perpetuating a system in which she has no control or agency simply because she needs to succeed on the system’s terms (ultimately, Sandra considers herself one of “the fortunate, the un-raped”).
Told in the quiet, resigned voice of a self-confessed “stale 39-year-old woman” who has been chewed up and spat out by the industry she once adored, Complicit is a quietly blistering J’accuse.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).
