Breakneck by Erica Spindler

Sphere €13.49
ONCE in a while a thrilling author loses the thrill. Breakneck was like that for me.
It starts with a computer hacker murdered for his password. He or his friends have stolen $500,000 he happened to find lying around in a bank account.
Investigating the killing is detective ‘MC’ (Mary Catherine) Riggio, a nice girl from a big Catholic Italian family who’s about to marry the man of her dreams.
Then he’s killed. Then MC’s cousin Tommy is killed.
It should be thrilling. But somehow it all felt ho-hum. It was as if the writer was working from a formula.
She finally lost me when - after yet another murder - MC and her partner arrive at a suburban house garlanded with crime scene tape and surrounded by police cars.
They go in to interview the grieving parents, who tell them that the kids haven’t been told yet. The idea that anyone could conceal such delightfully gruesome excitement from a house full of kids is just not tenable.
There is a pleasingly evil bad guy, and Spindler has done her research about the shadowy world of the hackers.
And the life of big extended Italian families that love and protect every sister, kid and cousin.
If you love the subterranean world of the cracker, but long for a pasta-packing mama, you’ll love Breakneck.
Author's blog

Arctic Chill by Arnaldur Indridason

Harvill Secker €17.39

ROAMING bands of adolescents spend their days in many Irish housing estates, as their parents work long hours, leaving them without supervision or help.
The same in Iceland, it seems.
Arctic Chill begins with the image of a stabbed child, frozen to the ground by his own blood, dead outside a deserted block of flats.
This is the latest in a series of haunting stories about Icelandic police investigating not just crime, but the chill sadness at the centre of their own lives.
As detectives Erlendur, Elinborg and Sigurdur Óli investigate the death of the half-Thai, half-Icelandic boy, everyone stymies them.
What kind of people are the family, Erlendur asks the interpreter, and she replies: "Very ordinary people. People like you and me. Poor people."
And immigrants.
And in Iceland, where people speak plainly and keep a distance from their neighbours, there's a certain distaste for incomers.
The police are halted at every turn, but gradually their work turns up leads: the seedy man with a computer loaded with pornography; the teacher who thinks "they shouldn't let those people into the country"; the feral middle-class children.
Written in a plain, down-to-earth yet lyrical style, Arctic Chill is a cool examination of our value for children - as well as a gripping, harrowing story.
Publisher's site

The Shadow in the River by Frode Grytten

The Shadow in the River
Frode Grytten
(Abacus)


ODDA is a quiet Norwegian town, where Robert Bell's the local stringer for a national paper.

Norway is like Ireland used to be: a murder is big news, a story that will last all summer.

When a young lad goes into the river in his car, everyone knows it's murder, and the Serbs killed him.

But Robert's paper parachutes in a star journalist and photographer to cover the story, and Robert is demoted to their chauffeur and local source.

He watches with lip lifted as they wade in, asking the wrong questions and treading on toes. They ask him to 'tickle' his brother, who's the cop leading the investigation; he says his brother isn't ticklish.

Indeed he isn't, and Robert is having an affair with his brother's wife - secret, they hope, but how secret can anything be in a small town where everyone calls the nationalist leader 'Knickers' because he's known to steal panties off washing lines.

Robert looks at it all with the gloomy eyes of a basset hound, wondering where social democracy went, and thinking 'There's nothing easier than covering a murder'.

Frode Grytten's morose thriller isn't really about murder, though; it's about ambition, greed, globalisation, money and excuses, lit by mordant humour and incisive insights.