Irish Crime Fiction

THE KEEPER

Former Chicago cop Cal Hooper has fetched up in the Irish village of Ardnakelty, where he supplements his pension with woodworking and carpentry. This is the third novel in the series, but for newcomers, the cast list comprises:

Lena, his kind-of fiancée. She is a widow.
Noreen, her sister. She runs the village shop and is a one woman Greek chorus and general busybody.
Tommy Moynihan, a would-be big shot, manager of a local factory, rich but widely disliked.
His son Eugene, something in Dublin finance circles.
Rachel Holohan, his long time girlfriend.
Trey, a teenage girl, something of a wild child, informally adopted by Cal, whose natural daughter Alyssa still lives in America.
The drinkers at the Seán Óg pub. They are a diverse mix of farmers and strugglers, but unequivocally wedded to Ardnakelty and its heritage, for good or bad.

We learn that all is not well between Rachel and Eugene. She is reported missing one night, and then Cal and other searchers find her body in the local river. Weeks pass before the authorities declare her death a suicide, through drinking antifreeze. Meanwhile, the village has become polarised with gossip and speculation, the fault line being suspicion of – or support for – the Moynihans.In the long dead days between Rachel Holohan’s death and her body being released for burial, Ardnakelty begins to twitch.

A better snapshot of a rural Irish wake you will not find:
“I’m starving, “Bobby says dolefully.
At a long table at the end of the room, a scrawny kid with an unconvincing mustache is ladling soup from a tureen into bowls for a line of the kind of old women who can’t be killed by anything short of a lightning strike.
Bobby eyes him wistfully.
‘I’d eat the hind leg off the lamb of God.”

At a hefty 400 plus pages this is no crime caper throwaway. Tana French uses the time and space to plant a seed of suspicion beneath the turf of Ardnakelty. The seed germinates, puts out roots, and then produces the flowers which Baudelaire called Fleurs de Mal. As Rachel is laid to rest, the parish priest cannot resist a biblical reference to the evil of suicide, while the Moynihans and Rachel’s family sit, pointedly, on opposite sides of the church.

The enigmatic Trey thinks that the antifreeze suicide makes no sense; Lena has told no-one about the night Rachel visited her, ostensibly to ask for Lena’s veterinary advice about her cat, but actually – and tearfully – wanting someone to talk to. In an effort to find out what is going on, as tensions increase, Lena goes to see Noreen”s mother in law, who seems to know all and see all, despite never leaving the house:

“At the heart of it all is Mrs. Duggan, vast and formless, in a magenta dress, coated with swirls of tiny magenta beads, like one of those underwater creatures that lie wide-mouthed on the seabed, waiting to receive anyone and anything that comes their way.”

As opinions in Ardnakelty polarise between the pro and anti Moynihan camps, Tana French gives us a magnificent pub brawl which (old movie buffs, pay attention) might have been orchestrated by John Ford, with John Wayne and Victor McLaglen in full flight.

Despite his being an outsider and a former Chicago cop, Cal feels connected:

“Cal doesn’t know how to find words for what he means.The things he’s come to prize in this place are not, mostly, the ones he moved here in search of.The beauty is all there and more, but he was also picturing simplicity and peace, maybe even innocence, none of which showed up in any noticeable quantity.Instead, he’s found the intricate webs constructed over centuries that bind people to one another, to their land and to their past.He’s under no illusion that these bindings are simple or innocent either.They’ve sliced people to the bone, scourged them out of town, choked them to death. But alongside all that, they’ve held the place together, steadfast in the face of time, dark happenings, rifts, attacks, and sieges.”

This is a brilliant and addictive crime novel and a rather superior whodunnit, but it is so much more. Tana French’s portrait of small town rural Ireland, with its gossip, linguistic quirks, petty jealousies, long-held grudges and its ambiguous relationship with the land and its climate reveals in words what Rembrandt brought to life with brush strokes. I have never set foot in Ireland, so I cannot say if her version is accurate. What I do know is that no contemporary English writer does the same thing for our villages and small towns. We are, of course, a very crowded and compact country and much more in thrall to globalist media influence, so perhaps the comparison is unfair. In the end, good triumphs – after a fashion. Tommy Moynihan is stopped in his tracks, but not before a good man dies. The Keeper will be published by Viking on 2nd April.

March 26, 2026 0

THE TRIAL . . . Between the covers

First up, this novel isn’t a courtroom drama. Literally, it is about a big pharma multinational testing out what could be a game-changing drug to combat the effects of dementia. Metaphorically, though, Jo Spain’s latest thriller sees the lives of several individuals put under intense scrutiny, as if being questioned by a hard-nosed barrister in a court of law. Serious questions are asked, and some people fall after being challenged.

I am not normally a fan of split-time narratives, as they are all too often distracting short cuts, but Jo Spain is too good a writer to be accused of that, and in her hands it works well. There are three time zones. In 2014 we are in a prestigious Irish university college, St Edmunds, and we meet Dani. She is asleep, but her lover – Theo Laurent, French, and a fellow student – is about to make a very serious decision. He carefully climbs down from their shared bed and leaves. Not ‘leaves’ as in just going back to his own room, but ‘leaves’ as in disappears. Totally. Completely. From the face of the earth. Anxious and baffled hours for Dani turn into days and weeks. The police are not interested. Theo’s estranged and autocratic father reluctantly tells Dani over the ‘phone that he has received an email from his son stating that he has left the academic world to go travelling.

The two other time frames are 2023 and the present day. More so than in her excellent Tom Reynolds police procedural series, Jo Spain, in her standalone novels, likes to sucker punch her readers with astonishing plot twists, none more breathtaking than in The Perfect Lie ( click the link to read my review) These literary magic tricks are usually saved until the final pages of the novel, but here she does her stuff about half way through, when she lets us know that Dani is not who or what we think she is. To say more would be to spoil the fun. Suffice it to say that Jo Spain simply encourages us to make assumptions, which she then delights in shattering.

We learn that Dani, as far as the new ‘wonder drug’ is concerned, certainly has a dog in this particular fight. Her widowed mother is slowly succumbing to the inexorable death sentence known as Alzheimer’s. What if the new wonder drug could arrest her mother’s decline, and restore her memory, and make her sit up in bed with delight when her daughter comes to visit?

Academic impartiality seems to be a things of the past, certainly in the United Kingdom, and in Ireland, where this novel is set. In England, many universities – and even some independent school – have been bought and sold with Chinese money, but in the case of St Edmunds, it is not Xi’s millions that is paying the salaries of lecturers and professors, but the big dollars of the pharmaceutical industry. A convincing report from the medical researchers at St Edmunds, stating that the new drug poses no side-effect risks means that Turner Pharma can go ahead and mass produce the tablets, and ensuring massive world-wide profits. In trying to solve the mystery of Theo’s disappearance, Dani learns that pharmaceutical companies, just like their illegal counterparts in Mexico and Columbia, employ clever but crooked lawyers, use physical enforcers, and have limitless budgets to buy off politicians and law enforcement

The Trial works brilliantly on many different levels. There is the human anguish as Dani attempts to come to terms with Theo’s inexplicable departure. Jo Spain then invites us to be disgusted at the many ways in which academic institutions can become a simple market place commodity, and sold to the highest bidder. Above all, though, is the satisfaction derived from reading something written by a natural born story teller. There is not a word out of place, not a scene that wouldn’t work as a TV screenplay and – best of all – human characters of whom we might say, “Yes – I know someone like that.” The Trial is published by Quercus and is available now.

June 8, 2024 0

THE TRAP . . . Between the covers

The story centres around Lucy O’Sullivan whose sister Nikki is one of three young women abducted from the night time Irish streets. No trace of any of them has been found. Lucy has devised a very risky ploy in order to try and track down her sisters abductor. She has purposely put herself in harms way on lonely country roads at night, hoping to be picked up by the same person who took her sister. So far, she has been unsuccessful.

“The slip road didn’t just take them off the motorway, but all the way back to 2008, the year the Celtic Tiger choked and died, to what was surely supposed to have been just the first phase of an entirely new community full of hopes and dreams and overstretched mortgage payers, but which, in the economic carnage that followed never made it past that. Enormous apartment blocks, apparently inspired by the Soviet era,towered behind rows of tiny boxy houses, glued together in never ending rows, without so much as a grassy verge between their driveways, on a bleak desolate landscape of burnt grass, weeds and bare soil. To get to them you had to pass a U-shaped retail park that at first glance looked completely empty but, on second at least had an Aldi. A huge flag like sign lied that the other units represented a prime retail opportunity as it flapped in the wind, its end ripped and fraying.”

We are introduced fairly early in the piece to the supposed abductor. He seems to be an amenable sort of chap; he and his wife Amy spend their evenings on the sofa. He has one eye on a book, usually historical non fiction, while his other eye is on the TV screen, which is usually showing some kind of true crime drama, a genre much loved by his wife.

Catherine Ryan Howard shines an unforgiving light on the way in which the media treats the parents and family of women or children who have been abducted or murdered. Jennifer Gold was the youngest of the three missing women. She was conventionally beautiful, a scholar, high achiever and photogenic. Likewise her mother Margaret is polished, well groomed and an assured media performer. By contrast, Tana Meehan – the first woman to be abducted – was overweight and something of a wreck of a person, having left her husband to go home to live with her elderly and ill parents. Nicki O’Sullivan, or so it was reported, had been last seen staggering around on the pavement after drinking too much at a party.

Heading up the investigation – Operation Tide – into the three missing women is Garda Síochána detective Denise Pope. She has an unlikely – and highly unofficial assistant in the shape of civilian employee, Angela Murphy. Angela wants to be a proper copper, but is not in the best of shape physically, and she failed the fitness test which all would-be trainees have to pass. She has to settle for being little more than a secretary, handling calls and paperwork involving missing persons. Fate gives her a helping hand, however, when a member of the public, frustrated at not being taken seriously by the officers, hands her a potential clue. The woman works in a charity shop, and brings Angela a handbag, the contents of which have the potential to turn the case on its head.

The Trap has a complex plot, with many a twist and turn on the way. The novel ends rather enigmatically, in my view, but it is another fine thriller by a writer who knows exactly how to make her readers’ spines tingle. It is published by Bantam and is out now in Kindle and will be on sale from 17th August as a hardback.

August 4, 2023 0

DON’T LOOK BACK . . . Between the covers

Having had the pleasure of meeting Jo Spain, I can tell you that she is a delightful person. That said, when she is in writing mode, don’t believe a word she says. Away from her superb police procedural series featuring Dublin copper Tom Reynolds, she has written several stand-alone thrillers, in which she practices to deceive. In The Perfect Lie, she bowled us a Googly or, for American readers, threw us a massive curve-ball:

THE PERFECT LIE . . . Between the covers

In Don’t Look Back she runs through the complete repertoire of her trickery. She tells us the main characters are:
Luke Miller: A decent – but driven – investment banker who fall in love with, and marries –
Rose Miller: An Irish lass, née Gillespie, now a teacher in London and married to Luke, Has an abusive ex boyfriend called:
Kevin Davidson: A member of a rich and powerful Donegal family, whose wealth may not have been acquired entirely legally.
Mickey Sheils: A former lawyer, and onetime lover of Luke Miller. Originally from Ireland, now working in London to protect abused women from their abusive former partners. Able to act mostly pro-bono, thanks to her marriage to:
Nathan Sheils: A big man in The City, formerly Luke’s boss.

Be prepared, however, for some of these people to be – how best to put it? – not entirely who they appear to be. The story starts off in a fairly straightforward manner. Rose and Luke are married, but due to Rose’s trauma at the hands of Kevin Davidson, their courtship had been a case of two steps forward, one step back. Rose turns up at Luke’s workplace, complete with airline tickets and packed bags, and announces that she has arranged a super surprise – a delayed honeymoon on the idyllic Caribbean island of Saint-Thérèse. Their stay is blissful, but on the last night, Luke senses that Rose has become agitated and distracted. Then, she blurts out that they cannot possibly be on their return flight to London the next day.

The reason? Because on the floor of their bedroom in Luke’s flat, lying there since the day they left for Saint-Thérèse, is a corpse. It is the mortal remains of Kevin Davidson, who had been stalking Rose for weeks, and finally made his big appearance. They had fought, Rose had pushed him, he lost his footing and cracked his skull – with fatal consequences – on the sharp edger of a very solid piece of Edwardian furniture. Rose’s initial panic had metamorphosed into a plan. A desperate one, yes, but a temporary solution. Luke’s flat is the only one occupied on that floor, and its remoteness would give them at least a few days’ grace.

Luke books them out of their hotel and, despite having had a fairly frosty relationship with Mickey Sheils since he ended their affair, he calls her and asks her to go to his flat and investigate. Reluctantly, she does, but when she gets there, guess what? There is plenty of dried blood – but no body.

What follows is classic Jo Spain (left). One block at a time, she kicks away the supports of what we think we know about what is going on. I read the book on my Kindle, and even when it said 99%, there was time for one more surprise. This is wonderfully inventive stuff, and shows that one of Ireland’s finest writers is at the top of her game. As a footnote, I enjoyed the dramatic contrast in settings, with the tropical tourist paradise of Saint-Thérèse starkly juxtaposed against the bleak Donegal coast, where the icy horizontal rain takes no prisoners. Don’t Look Back is published by Quercus, and will be available on 11th May.

May 5, 2023 0

THE LAST TO DISAPPEAR . . . Between the covers

No-one will ever accuse Jo Spain of being unadventurous. With a best-selling series of police procedurals under her belt – the superb Tom Reynolds novels – a lesser writer might hunker down and play safety first by sticking to the familiar. But that’s not Jo Spain. Her last standalone thriller, The Perfect Lie (click for review), was set in Newport, Rhode Island, and now she takes us to the ski resort of Koppe in icy Finland, where Brit Alex Evans has travelled to identify the murdered body of his sister, Vicky. She was something of a ‘free spirit’, having wandered half the way round Europe doing a variety of temporary jobs (including pole dancing in a Spanish bar), always broke, but always looking for the next big adventure. Her body has been found by an ice fisherman, and has been in the water for some time.

Handling the investigation is local police chief Agatha Koskinen, but Alex is determined to ask his own questions. He discovers that Vicky had been working at a local hotel and had made friends with an American tourist who is now back in the states, but has an alibi for the time when Vicky disappeared. Agatha has demons of her own to contend with, however, as somewhere out there is the abusive parent of her three children – Luca – and she fears for them should Luca come back into their lives.

As ever, Jo Spain weaves a complex mystery, and gives us a split time narrative. She takes us back to 1998 where we are a fly on the wall in the house of Miika and Kaya Vartinen. Miika is a Sami – one the ethnic people of what used to be known as Lapland. He is a reindeer herder. Kaya is pregnant, but Miika is not the father. She is carefully managing the usual symptoms so that when she tells him, Miika will believe the child is his.

The significance of the book’s title becomes clear when Alex visits Agatha at her home, and she reveals that Vicky is the latest woman to disappear in a ten-year period, and that Kaya Vatinen was the first. She also tells Alex that Miika Vartinen is widely suspected as being involved in the disappearances, but no evidence has ever emerged to connect him to the cases.

With the most delicate of touches, Jo Spain hints at the darker aspects of life in Koppe, where there is an undercurrent of racism towards the Sami people, and she reminds us of the familiar theme of movers and shakers in tourist resorts – think the Mayor of Amity Island in Jaws – not wanting anything to disturb the inward flow of visitors and their cash. There is also the spectre of an international mining company sensing a million dollar windfall from the minerals sitting beneath the pristine and picturesque Finnish landscape.

Jo Spain’s tricksy thrillers are very cleverly written. She relies on us making assumptions. She invites us to make these assumptions rather like a fly fisherman casting the cunningly constructed fly on the water, hoping it will fool the fat trout (aka the reader). When we realise we have been gulled, we might turn back a few ages and react with something like, “hang on – didn’t she tell us that …?“, only to find that what she wrote was perfectly ambiguous, and that we have jumped to the wrong conclusion. Perhaps there’s a few too many mixed metaphors there, but I hope you get my drift.

There are only two predictable things about a Jo Spain thriller. The first? There will be a dramatic plot twist. The second? You won’t see it coming! The Last to Disappear is published by Quercus, and will be out on 12th May. For more of my reviews of Jo’s books, click the image below.

May 8, 2022 0

NINE LIVES . . . Between the covers

This thriller is relatively brief, but it buzzes like an angry hornet. It begins in rural Ireland in 1979, when a terrified girl escapes from being held by an unknown assailant. She finds refuge in a farmhouse, and the farmer’s wife arranges for a neighbour to drive her to the nearest Garda Síochána station. Neither the girl nor the neighbour is ever seen alive again. Some months later, the girl’s remains are found. There is little left of Hazel Devereaux, but just enough to reveal, on examination, that her throat had been cut.

The action skips thirty years, and Jim Mulcahy who was the rookie detective covering the girl’s disappearance is now Superintendent, and heading for retirement. When recreational scuba divers find the rusting remains of a car at the bottom of a local lough with a skeleton on the back seat – which turns out to be the headless remains of Frank Rudden – the case is reopened. It was Rudden who drove off in his VW Beetle that fateful night three decades earlier, with Hazel Devereaux as his passenger. We are now, of course, in the age of smartphones and internet search engines, and it doesn’t take the Irish coppers long to link this cold case to several similar murders in that Irish home-from-home, Boston Massachusetts. Detective Ray Logue is sent to liaise with the Boston PD, in particular Officers Sam Harper and Olivia Callaghan.

The rough-and-ready Irish policeman manages to ruffle the feathers of his more sophisticated American counterparts, but they soon make three interesting discoveries. One is that the dates of the Boston murders have an uncanny connection – they are all numerically linked with the number nine. You can Google it, and see that there is a long tradition of mysticism connected to the number, but Ray is initially unimpressed by what he feels is “hocus pocus.” The second discovery is that Donal Keane, an Irish academic was in the area at the time of Hazel Devereaux’s murder and then immediately decamped to Boston, where he has been ever since. The third – and most sinister – connective element is that each of the victims has been sent a brief note containing a quotation from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe.

As Logue, Callaghan and Harper close in on who they think is the killer, Kevin McManus bowls us a couple of googlies – or perhaps I should say, since we are in Boston, throws down some curve balls – and all is not what it seems to be.

Kevin McManus (right) primarily writes Crime Fiction novels but also delves into writing poetry and short stories. He lives in County Leitrim in Western Ireland with his wife Mary and their dog Jack. He works by day as a secondary school teacher. In addition to the Ray Logue books Kevin has written a series based around a New York Detective called John Morrigan. His debut novel, published in 2016, was The Whole of the Moon. Nine Lives is a highly original and cleverly conceived thriller which gives a new twist to the serial killer genre. It is published by Spellbound Books and is available now.

July 24, 2021 2

THE PERFECT LIE . . . Between the covers

When you read a Jo Spain stand-alone novel, you know you are going to be misled, made a fool of, and led up the garden path – all in the nicest possible way. Her Tom Reynolds police procedurals (see some reviews here are more straightforward and stick to the conventions of the genre, but when she spins a yarn outside of those confines, you learn to trust her narrators about as far as you can throw a grand piano.

Such is the case in The Perfect Lie. Erin Kennedy – an Irish lass – works in publishing in New York, is married to American cop Danny Ryan, and they live in Newport, Rhode Island. No, Danny is not a fellow Celt, despite his surname, but beautifully black, at least in Erin’s eyes. One morning, she answers the doorbell to their apartment and admits Danny’s cop colleague Ben – stern of face – and a couple of fellow officers. Within seconds Danny, freshly showered and shaved for the day’s shift has walked to the balcony and jumped to his death on the concrete four floors below.

What follows is a journey into a labyrinth of blind alleys and false assumptions. Erin learns that Danny was the subject of an internal police inquiry, and was about to be arrested for corruption. She later discovers that he had secret bank accounts containing tens of thousands of dollars. Two other significant characters are introduced; Cal Hawley, the scion of a wealthy local family who has some connection with what Danny Ryan was involved in before his death, and Karla Delgado, a feisty lawyer who agrees to work for Erin pro-bono.

The split narratives of the book are not for complacent or inattentive readers. A couple of times I had to check back and make sure that I knew exactly what was going on. The viewpoints are these:

Erin on the morning of Danny’s death, and the weeks following.

The retrospective account of a young woman called Ally, a proctor at Harvard University.

Erin, over a year after Danny’s death, when she is in custody and in court being tried for her husband’s murder.

Bullet points one and three seem to be incompatible, so you might think that the obvious solution is that Danny did not die as we are told in the first few pages. The fact that Erin is not allowed to ID her husbands body, and that he is cremated in a closed casket suggests that something strange is going on, but what, exactly – and why? Eventually, the link between Ally, her mentee Lauren Gregory, and the Danny Ryan/ Erin Kennedy story is revealed. And Jo Spain has tricked us – well, I certainly fell for it – into making a huge assumption.

Jo Spain has has created her own version of the classic locked room mystery. It happened, yet it is impossible that it could have happened. She is The Queen of The Night in terms of misdirection and she entices us into a spider’s web where we thrash helplessly until she puts us out of our misery. In the end, however, she can put on her best innocent face and say’ “who…me?’ because when the penny drops we realise we have misled ourselves.This is another masterpiece from, in my opinion, Ireland’s finest contemporary writer. The Perfect Lie is published by Quercus, and is out today, 13th May.

My reviews of other books by Jo Spain can be found HERE

May 13, 2021 0

AFTER THE FIRE . . . Between the covers

Jo Spain’s Irish copper Tom Reynolds – now Detective Chief Superintendent, if you please – returns in After The Fire and we are, as ever, in Dublin’s Fair City. Are the girls still ‘So Pretty’? The young woman walking naked down the city street, much to the astonishment of shoppers might have been pretty once, but now she is in a terrible state. Hair awry, skin blackened with dirt and a look of sheer terror in her eyes.

Except that is not dirt on her skin. It is soot, and she has escaped, traumatised, from a catastrophic house fire. The terraced house is in an area which has moved upmarket because of its proximity to the The International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) but the services being offered at the ruined house were something different altogether. First one body is recovered, and then another, and as the young woman – a Russian – recovers in hospital, it becomes clear to the police that the house was a brothel, and she was one of the items on the grisly menu.

As a DCS, Tom Reynolds is not meant to get his hands dirty at an investigational level, but there is no drama in balancing budgets and supervising staff deployment, so the admirable Mrs Spain has Tom notionally taking a spot of leave so that he can lend a hand in the case which is being led by his former protégé Laura Lennon.

Tyanna, the woman who fled the fire, is too terrified of the people who controlled the trade at 3 Shipping Row to be of much use, but she has mentioned a baby, now missing, the child of a young woman whose corpse was discovered in the building. Another frightened young woman – Nina Cusack – who was bought and sold there has also emerged, but she has sought sanctuary with her parents and is, again, too terrified to divulge much about the identities of the guilty men who are controlling the brutal trade.

The sheer fluency of Jo Spain’s writing will come as no surprise to those of us who are long term admirers, and the bottom line is that every book she writes is, quite simply, a bloody fine read. It is, however, worth taking a moment to look at just how and why she is so good. Lesser writers will seed their narratives with gore and gruesome detail, while Spain leaves us in no doubt about how brutal people can be, but in a much more subtle way.

Some police procedurals rely too much on the central copper being a maverick, or a bitter misanthrope, or a damaged person with a hundred different devils to fight each day. Tom Reynolds doesn’t distract us in that way – he is a decent man who has been dealt a fair hand by fate, and so we don’t waste valuable time having to understand him by examining his CD collection. (Yes, I know CDs are so very yesterday, but you get my drift)

As for elaborate scene setting with endless paragraphs about how Dublin looks, smells, sounds and feels, Jo Spain puts us in the place with a couple of telling sentences. We know we are in Dublin – that’s fine – but then she gets on with the important stuff. The important stuff? That is the story and above all, Jo Spain is a storytelling genius. Those who follow her career will know she is also much sought after as a screenwriter. The Tom Reynolds books and the stand-alones are not written for the screen, but they may as well be because every page, every paragraph and every sentence comes to life as vividly – and as visually – as if we were standing right there, watching.

After The Fire is published by Quercus. It is available now as a Kindle, and will be out in paperback on 6th August.

For more on Jo Spain and her novels, click the image below.

August 3, 2020 0

SIX WICKED REASONS . . . Between the covers

artre insisted that the celebrated line from his 1944 play Huis Clos (No Exit), “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” was forever misinterpreted, but the idea that hell is other people has stuck, despite the protestations of the Great Existentialist. Some, like Jo Spain in her latest novel Six Wicked Reasons, would suggest – to mix and match poets – that Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell could be condensed into an overpowering tenth – Family.

The Lattimer family, patriarch Frazer, sons James, Adam and Ryan, daughters Ellen, Kate and Clíodhna – Clio – have assembled at the family home in south east Ireland overlooking the waters of Spanish Cove in the Irish Sea, so called because of its earliest recorded casualties – sailors from a Spanish galleon blown adrift from the Armada and then shattered on the hidden rocks.

Something has gone badly wrong. With the family gathered aboard a luxury yacht moored just off-shore, and apparently partying, Frazer Lattimer has been hauled from the water, as dead as any Spanish sailor, with a mortal wound to his head. Now his children are huddled on shore, wrapped in space blankets, being interrogated by a member of the local Garda Síochána. And, of course, one of them must be the killer. Mustn’t they?

eaders new to Jo Spain’s novels will welcome the apparently straightforward back-stories of Frazer Lattimer’s children, and their motives for wanting him dead. Those who know that the author is The Mistress of Misdirection will suspect, correctly, that this is only the start. But, for the record, I give you the Lattimer children. James is a big media name, with TV screenwriting and production credits on his CV. Lives in Dublin, of course with ex-model wife and step daughter. Adam – now there’s a tale. He now lives abroad, making money for fun, but he disappeared ten years earlier, broke the heart of his late mother Kathleen, and has now re-appeared, equally mysteriously, and it is his return ‘from the dead’ which has prompted the reunion. Ryan, alas poor Ryan. Drug addicted as a teenager, he has somehow survived industrial intakes of pharmaceuticals, and now lives in Italy, just about getting by as an odd-job man.

llen Lattimer is the female equivalent of the Prodigal Son’s brother. Remember, the bloke who stayed at home while his brother was out on the town, giving it all away? Ellen has stayed at home, cleaning, cooking, dusting – and paying for the upkeep of the house. She is prim, joyless, and what Private Eye used to call “tight-lipped and ashen-faced.” Kate, on the other hand, has spread her wings and learned to fly. Having overcome a teenage weight problem which caused her to be known locally as King Kong, she is now svelte, lean and lovely. Also, married to a filthy rich Chinese businessman with a chain of luxury hotels. Clio, though has been in the wars. Summoned from a dingy bedsit in downtown New York to attend the family gathering, she is the most volatile of the children, the antithesis of the line from the old hymn which described Our Lord as “slow to chide and swift to bless.”

You could write what Jo Spain doesn’t know about plotting on the back of a postage stamp and still have room to inscribe the Lord’s Prayer, but she also has an ear for dialogue that is purely musical in its accuracy. We have the six Lattimer siblings, their father in flashback, plus his recently acquired Polish fiancée; to complete the line-up add Rob, an intriguing local policeman, and Danny, the grizzled mariner whose platonic love for Kathleen Lattimer broke his heart and yet made it sing. Ten totally different people, yet when each of them speaks, they are totally credible down to every word, every syllable and every inflection.

s an amateur wordsmith I can only guess at Jo Spain’s writing technique; her prose is so assured, so fluent and has that sense of flair that cannot, surely, be the result only of endless hours of editing. No matter how long you spend polishing a piece of coal, you will never transform it into a gem stone. Six Wicked Reasons is a diamond, multi-faceted and reflecting both the light and the darkness of the human soul. It is published by Quercus and is out on 16^th January.