Digging for clues, from Vienna to Donegal

CRIME BEAT:A STRIPPER DURING HER wild-child youth, Megan Pierce is now "living the ultimate soccer-mom fantasy and hating it" as Harlan Coben's Stay Close (Orion, £18.99) opens. Tempted back to her old haunts in the sleazier corners of Atlantic City, Megan finds herself at the heart of an investigation into multiple murders and the target of a pair of sociopathic killers.

Coben’s 11th standalone novel, and his 23rd in total, Stay Close is a pacy tale that switches rapidly between a variety of characters’ perspectives, among them Megan’s former lover, Ray, the investigating police officer, Broome, and the killers pursuing her. Written in a forthright and unfussy style, and offering Coben’s usual blend of teasers, red herrings and cliffhanger chapter endings, the novel asks some intriguing questions about conventional notions of morality, and attempts to persuade us to empathise with a serial killer whose motives are entirely noble and justified.

The plot has an unsettling tendency to veer from grittily realistic to wildly implausible and back, but Coben’s vividly etched characters are compelling enough to keep the pages turning right to the end.

Opening in Vienna in 1934, and spanning the second World War and the early years of the cold war, John Lawton’s A Lily of the Field (Grove Press, £7.99) is a satisfying blend of the classic spy novel and the police procedural. At the start Merét Voytek is 10 years old, a talented young cellist in a Vienna alert to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. It’s her story that provides the thread around which Lawton weaves a complex tale of subversion, betrayal and double- and treble-crosses, as a host of characters engage in a bewildering dance to a soundtrack of Beethoven, Debussy, Liszt and Mozart.

Meanwhile, the laconic, elegant style superbly evokes a startling range of settings, from the fading glories of prewar Vienna to the harsh deserts of New Mexico, from the horrors of Auschwitz to the austere backdrop to London’s Olympic Games of 1948. Lawton’s closest contemporary peer is Alan Furst, but A Lily of the Field is comparable to the best work of John le Carré, Eric Ambler or Helen MacInnes.

Set in Florence during a stifling summer heatwave, Christobel Kent’s The Dead Season (Corvus, £12.99) is the third novel to feature former policeman Sandro Cellini, who now operates as a private detective. Most of Florence’s citizens have left the city for the beaches, which complicates the disappearance of a respectable bank manager, husband and father, who may well be the same man who has run away from his pregnant lover. With the aid of a group of helpers that includes his wife, their daughter and his former partner in the police, Sandro sets out – wearily, reluctantly – to track down the missing man.

The Dead Season is the seventh novel that Kent has set in Italy, and her eye for detail is superb, as is her ability to convey the stultifying effects of a Florentine heatwave. Unfortunately, she proves a little too persuasive: the story’s pedestrian pace, labyrinthine plot and constant references to characters’ lassitude and indolence collude to sap the novel of its energy.

Megan Abbott’s The End of Everything was one of the finest crime novels published last year, and Dare Me (Picador, £12.99) confirms her ability to create compelling crime narratives in the unlikeliest of settings.

In Dare Me Beth and Addy are high-school cheerleaders, and the latter narrates a powerful tale of sexual awakening, obsession, twisted loyalties and murder against a backdrop of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The style is a compelling blend of teenspeak and fever-dream intensity, as Addy describes how the arrival of a new cheerleading coach challenges the authority of the cheerleading queen, Beth, setting in train events that quickly accelerate towards tragedy.

Abbott deftly plays with the conventional tropes of a hundred high-school movies, investing them with pitch-black humour as her ostensibly cute cheerleaders move from boredom to cynicism to full-blooded and lethal nihilism.

The fifth in Brian McGilloway’s Co Donegal-set series to feature Garda detective Ben Devlin, The Nameless Dead (Macmillan, £12.99) opens with the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains discovering the body of a man believed to have been murdered by the IRA about 30 years earlier. It also turns up a number of other corpses, infants who appear to have suffered from a condition that would have killed them at birth – apart from one, who has been strangled to death. The legislation is clear on the matter: Devlin is not entitled to investigate the infants’ deaths any further. A devout Catholic and a family man, Devlin refuses to allow the matter to rest, and he is determined that the murdered infant will not be left in the limbo of the nameless dead.

Told with McGilloway’s customary quiet authority, The Nameless Dead fully deserves its Rankinesque title, confirming the author’s reputation as a thoughtful, intelligent crime novelist. His stories – which are set on the physical border between Lifford and Strabane, and the Republic and Northern Ireland, but also occupy a space between the old and new Irelands – offer a voice not often heard amid the sturm und drang of modern crime fiction, that of a moderate, compassionate morality.

The story is contemporary enough to feature the commission and timeless enough to accommodate Yeats’s damning of Ireland as a sow eating its own farrow, but it does so in a way that is poignant and occasionally heartbreaking. The Nameless Dead is as good a novel of modern Ireland as you’re likely to read this year, crime or otherwise.

Declan Burke is a journalist and author. His novel Absolute Zero Cool was recently awarded the Goldsboro Last Laugh Award for the UK’s best humorous crime novel of 2011