'Reich still manages to think up highly original plots'
This week it’s all thrillers, moving from a London hotel room to a Dublin train station and from a woodland trail in the dead of night to daylight horrors on the highways and dirt tracks of North Carolina.
Room 706, Ellie Levinson, Headline Review, €15.99
Setting a thriller in a hotel room where two characters are trapped over the course of a single day is not only original, but you’d think also a bit crazy. How can a writer sustain tension, or even relieve tension, in such a confined setting? It’s to Levinson’s credit that she really pulls it off, although some elements are left unclear.
What is crystal clear is that happily married mother-of-two Kate and her illicit lover James, also married, should never have been together in hotel Room 706 in central London. They’ve been having clandestine hook-ups, just for the sex, for eight years now and each of them is married – to someone else. But during one such pre-lunch hour date, the hotel is taken over by a terrorist group. Kate and James are stuck.
Over the ensuing hours, Kate is forced to take stock of her life, her marriage, her entire life, and while doing so realises the man she is trapped with is not worth her time or her energy. They say our life flashes before us when we’re dying, but here Kate’s life is slowly unpacked in episodes, as she waits for what’s looking like imminent and violent death, either by bomb or by gun.
Run on Red, Noelle W. Ihli, Pan, €12.99
The reader is thrust straight into the action on the first page in this latest Ihli thriller. Olivia and Laura are on their way to a bonfire party, driving along a dark and remote country road, and finding that they’re being tailed by a truck. Its headlights prevent the girls from seeing who’s following them. And they have no idea why anyone would be following them anyway, in their old beat-up Volvo.
Turns out there are two masked men in pursuit and soon the girls are driven off the road, and the chase continues on foot. In the middle of nowhere. At night.
The reader is left as puzzled as the girls are over why two men should be chasing them, and if you haven’t read a chase novel recently, the tension in this one will certainly get your heart pounding. The year is 2006 and there are references to digital methods of communication that weren’t around at the time but that’s a small gripe. If your idea of fun is staying up all night and frightening the daylights out of yourself, Run on Red’s for you.
The Nowhere Girls, Carmel Harrington, Headline Review, €15.99
Two little girls, Vega and Nova, were left in Pearse Station in Dublin by their mother (which I think at that time was called Westland Row Station) in 1995. Their mother tells them to stay where they are, she’ll be back shortly. But she doesn’t return and the girls become the responsibility of the state. Nova is eventually adopted, but Vega is put into care, an experience that will make her wary of other people for the rest of her life.
Now in the present day, Vega is an investigative journalist and decides she’s going to investigate her own story. Where did her mother go on that day in 1995, why did she leave Vega and her sister, and how is it that nothing seems to be known about what happened to her? Were the girls just abandoned or was there something more sinister at play? It’s part mystery novel, part thriller and part testament of the great need in all of us to belong and to matter to somebody else.
Evil Bones, Kathy Reich, Simon and Schuster, €16.99
This is Reich’s 24th Temperance Brennan novel (where did the years go) and she still manages to think up highly original plots; a feat in itself. Brennan is a forensic anthropologist based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and she’s usually examining human bones but here she’s looking at a series of macabre killings of animals, from skunks and rats to beloved dogs.
The murdered animals are displayed in public places, twisted into macabre shapes and decorated with glitter and paint.
One elderly lady is so shocked by what sees hanging on the roadside that she loses control of her car and plunges off-road to her death.
Tempe and retired detective Erskine ‘Skinny’ Slidell go knocking on some doors to see what they can find out and meet some real freaks along the way.
Taxidermists always struck this reader as a bit odd, but in this story they’re more than odd. They’re social misfits and each one of them we encounter is a suspect. Tempe’s forensic psychologist friend expects that these carefully staged post-mortem tableaus will soon involve human rather than animal bones, and she turns out to be right.
Whoever is doing this has got too big for their boots, moving on from being cruel to animals to being a full-blown murderer. The plot is fast, the writing is great, the banter between the characters is droll and wry and you really can’t see what’s coming.
It’s this kind fast finesse that keeps Reich at the top of the bestseller lists, time after time.
Footnotes
The 30th Festival of Youth Orchestras takes place in the National Concert Hall this weekend, 7 February. In this marvellous cross-border initiative, youngsters from north and south will be entertaining the masses. Music from West Side Story, The Fellowship of the Ring and Man of Steel are some of the classical offerings along with some traditional music and several brand-new compositions. See nch.ie for details.
The Imbolc Festival that started last weekend in Derry is in full swing up to this coming Saturday, February 7, with lots going on in the meantime. It’s definitely one for die-hard traditional music fans with a website that’s difficult to read, as English is very much its second language. But if you’re up for figuring it out, or can speak/read Irish, see imbolcfesival.com for details.