The Courtship Gift. By Julie Parsons. Town House. 390pp. £12.99
Certain male insects, when they wish to impress a particular female, present her with the corpse of her previous partner, elegantly wrapped in silken threads - a courtship gift. This sombre ritual is, as you might expect, given an even more unsettling spin in Julie Parsons's new thriller, which examines the nature of human mating habits and the relationship between trust, gullibility and premeditated evil.
When Anna's husband, the successful and devoted solicitor David Neale, dies in mysterious circumstances, the web of emotional and financial deceit he had been weaving for several years is gradually revealed, leaving Anna caught between anguish and anger. Into her life - at precisely the right moment - steps the enigmatic Matthew Makepeace; handsome, charming, funny, an ideal and impeccably tailored shoulder to cry on. But if this sounds like just another romantic fiction outing with a soft crime centre, don't be deceived: it isn't. Parsons creates a subtle, sinister world which is recognisably Dublin, yet not the daytime Dublin we all know - hers is a city of shadows and absences, a deeply unsettling place inhabited by deeply disturbing people. Her prose style is taut and watchful, her pacing unhurried, driving the plot along without ever giving the impression that it's a plot-driven book; her characters are offbeat and interesting, never stooping to stereotype, though often toying with it - her blind drug courier, for example, and the cool, clean cop who is friendly, clean and happily married, are, in their different ways, memorable creations. A superior thriller; a terrific read; a most welcome addition to the canon of contemporary Irish fiction.
Arminta Wallace
Pearl. By Frank Delaney. HarperCollins. £16.99 in UK
Our collective fascination with the legacy of Nazi evil, with the power of events close to 60 years ago to haunt the present, has provided many a thriller writer with the basis of a good plot. Frank Delaney proves that it's a source that can still be mined with success in a fairly gripping story which links a terrible atrocity and the theft of Jewish bank accounts during the last war with organised football hooliganism and neo-Nazis today.
This is the second outing for his main character, middle-aged English architect Nicholas Newman, in a series of books that he presumably plans to build into a collection of gems - the first was called The Amethysts.
The "Pearl" of the title is, like our own Paul McGrath, a superstar black football player. He is linked to Newman through the mysterious Anthony Saaft, whose violent death in London triggers a sequence of frightening events that, in best thriller tradition, bring Newman to locations across Europe by car, plane and high-speed train - one particularly frightening sequence will put anyone who hasn't yet travelled via the Chunnel off the idea for good.
The story lumbers into life a little slowly, handicapped by having an initially rather unsympathetic character like Newman at its heart. Newman is an aloof, prissy, self-obsessed individual who obtusely refuses to see the connections between his friend's violent death, an unprovoked attack on him by football thugs, and his first meeting with footballer Johann Pearl about designing his new house - all in the same weekend. (And his anthropological approach to his first football game would make anyone want to thump him, not just a footie hooligan.)
But when Newman snaps out of his introspection and into decisive, indeed impressively violent, action rather a long way into the book, the pace gathers from slow chug to high-speed express. He breaks out of his emotional shell, tackles evil head on and is rewarded with true love - and, of course, victory over his enemies.
Not all the loose ends of a satisfyingly complex plot are tidied up by close of play, but it doesn't matter much: Delaney scores with the reader to win a definite result.
Frances O'Rourke
Quinn. By Seamus Smyth. Hodder and Stoughton. 278pp. £10 in UK
This is a thriller, set in Dublin, which is about the efforts of an arch-criminal named Paddy Toner to discredit investigative journalist Molly Murray, who is on his trail. The man he hires to carry out his scheme is her brother-in-law, the eponymous Quinn of the title. Quinn is a fixer, completely amoral and unscrupulous, and the situation he places Molly in is a Sophie's Choice conundrum of whether to save a school full of children or her own husband from the effects of a booby-trapped van. The explosion marks the beginning of the book, but the storyline then goes into flashback to recount the events that led up to this definitive solution.
The book is in the contemporary mode, especially with the inclusion of the determined, female crime reporter, but there is little evidence of any real insight into the Dublin crime scene. Characters are stereotyped and cliches abound, but the pace is fast and, on a light-entertainment level, the novel carries one along without strain on the little grey cells. It could, however, have done with a little more humour of the black variety.
Vincent Banville is the author of the John Blaine series of detective novels