The ordinary citizen plunged into extraordinary circumstances has been a staple of the thriller genre since John Buchan's The 39 Steps was published in 1915. Brian McGilloway's novels to date have generally been police procedurals, but The Empty Room (Constable, £16.99) revolves around Dora Condron, a woman whose life is turned upside down when her 17-year-old daughter Ellie goes missing.
With no special skills to call upon, Dora finds herself living a nightmare: the police are coolly efficient, her friends and neighbours are sympathetic and helpful, but Ellie can’t be found. Billed as a “heart-breaking thriller”, The Empty Room is a novel that, for once, delivers on its blurb, as McGilloway explores the minutiae of Dora’s frustration and helpless terror. Gradually, however, Dora’s experience becomes a universal one, and especially when we begin to see Ellie through Dora’s eyes.
An art student, Ellie decorated her bedroom with posters of Millais’ Ophelia, Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shallot and an Elpis by Jenny Saville. “They were part of a project she was doing about women in stories,” Dora tells us. “She’d talked about them to me – all those tragic women.” But if it is the case that her beloved Ellie has become one of “those tragic women” who are abducted and murdered, Dora – a woman with nothing left to lose – is not going to accept her daughter’s fate quietly. The result is a finely calibrated account of loss, grief and simmering rage that belies its understated style to set the synapses crackling.
Gill Perdue's debut adult thriller, The Interview (Penguin Sandycove, €18), opens with Laura Shaw, a specialist victim interviewer, attempting to communicate with the traumatised Jenny, a 14-year-old assault victim who either refuses to speak or else describes her experience according to a convoluted fairytale she has invented. Laura and her partner, Niamh, are initially frustrated and sympathetic; but when it becomes apparent that Jenny's abusive stepfather Stuart has gone missing, Jenny – who was covered in blood when admitted to hospital – becomes the prime suspect in his disappearance.
It’s a terrific set-up, and Jenny a fascinating character as she skilfully resists Laura’s attempts to get at the truth, but Perdue spends too much time on Laura’s back story – we learn that Laura, who suffers from “obsessions and anxious thoughts”, is suppressing a trauma of her own, and lives in constant fear of harming her young daughter Katie – all of which is interesting in and of itself, but tends to drain the story of its tension.
That said, The Interview is a powerful blend of police procedural, fantasy and domestic noir, by the conclusion of which Perdue leaves us in no doubt as to who the real villain(s) of the piece are: “I think of women getting killed when they decide to leave him, or when he decides to kill himself and wants to take her with him. Women killed for infidelity or burning the toast. Women killed for wearing the wrong clothes or for confronting him. Women and children killed for no reason at all.”
Set in rural Catalonia, Javier Cercas' Even the Darkest Night, translated by Anne McLean (MacLehose Press, £16.99), opens with a brutal triple murder. The elderly Adells have been tortured to death in what appears to be a ritualistic killing, but the police force of the dusty little town of Terra Alta have no idea why. Detective Melchor Marín, a recent arrival in Terra Alta, is assigned to the case, but when all the leads dry up Marín decides to investigate on his own. Marín has form in this regard, as we learn during Cercas' frequent and lengthy flashbacks to the detective's formative years: a teenage tearaway jailed for working for a Colombian drug cartel, Marín was inspired to become a policeman by his prison reading of Hugo's Les Misérables and a compulsion to track down the killer of his mother, a prostitute whose murder wasn't properly investigated.
Cercas’ attempts to draw parallels between Marín’s historical and current obsessions are only fitfully persuasive, however, and Marín’s back story, which is as extensive as it is improbable, ultimately leaches the investigation into the Adells’ death of its momentum.
The self-described "worst daughter of the worst mother", Emma Bournett is a Leeds-based divorce lawyer in Sarah Pinborough's latest thriller, Insomnia (HarperCollins, £12.99). With her 40th birthday only a week away, Emma finds herself unable to sleep at night, but it's not vanity at the ageing process: Emma's mother, Patricia, was also approaching 40 when she lost her mind and attempted to murder Emma's older sister, Phoebe.
Terrified that she might also try to harm her children, the exhausted Emma is horrified to discover that her young son Ben has begun drawing pictures of a “scary lady” holding a pillow and about to smother him. Pinborough doesn’t hold back as Emma’s life unravels. Accusations of professional incompetence, mental instability and even murder quickly follow as Emma descends into a maelstrom of self-doubt, paranoia and self-sabotaging delusion that is baffling, contradictory and wholly absurd.
“It makes no logical sense,” says Emma as she finally figures out what’s going on, “but at the same time makes impossible sense.” Any reader happy to play along with that kind of paradox will be hugely entertained.
William Boyle's Shoot the Moonlight Out (No Exit Press, £9.99) opens in Brooklyn in 1996 with a couple of kids tossing rocks at cars on the Belt Parkway, an ostensibly harmless piece of minor vandalism that soon escalates into tragedy.
Moving forward five years, Boyle introduces a number of characters: Jack Cornacchia, an ordinary blue-collar guy with a lethal sideline in “taking poison out of the world”; Charlie French, a loan shark who has just stumbled into a big score of heroin and cash; Lily Murphy, an aspiring novelist who sets up a writing class in the basement of a church; and Max Berry, a grifter and scam artist who takes the teenage punk Bobby Santovasco under his wing.
Set the story in Detroit or Florida and it could easily be an Elmore Leonard novel, and not just for its offbeat characters who keep colliding in increasingly tense scenarios. Boyle employs a deadpan, blackly comic style throughout (“Murder just isn’t hard if you’re half-smart,” Jack tells us as he snuffs out the life of the guy who has been stalking Lily. “Worst-case scenario is it’s sloppy.”), and also presents us with a Brooklyn that is grittily realistic while offering a romanticised, cinematic take on the crime genre: “She wants movies? This is the stuff of movies. Meet, fall in love, rob a guy, get hitched. The future’s the open road.” Crisply told, unsentimental in tone, and a richly detailed love-letter to Brooklyn’s hardscrabble world, Shoot the Moonlight Out is a very satisfying noir.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)
