Reading matters

I inherited my penchant for the thriller genre from my mother who read everything that Dorothy Sayers wrote and at the age of about ten or so I decided that Lord Peter Wimsey resembled closely one of the blue-bloods in our parish whose Christian name, Rollo, I fully intend to use in one of my own stories.

There were 'nice murders' in both my last books. Linda Fairstein packed her storytelling full of fascinating details of dark New York history but wove it well together with the highly contemporary and equally dark issue of people smuggling.

The blurb on the back cover of the book by Brian McGilloway is also praised by one reviewer as a 'dark tour de force'. Maybe. I found the accomplishment of the author noteworthy for the intimacy of the narrative, with a very human Inspector Benedict Devlin as the protagonist.

Here, too, there was a contemporary history lesson with regard to Ireland and its divisions, both political and sectarian.

Two good reads.