Once in a Lifetime by Cathy Kelly

HarperCollins €20.24
WHITE witchcraft in the mountains of Ireland, a straying husband whose sudden death reveals his secret life to a loving wife - Cathy Kelly is in business again.

Star Bluestone is the last of a family of women who have lived a pagan life in the middle of Christian Ireland for centuries. From her house in a grove of trees - each one planted by a Bluestone woman for a lover - she nurtures the troubled women of her country town.

Ingrid is a star journalist. But TV is a cruel world, and she’s watching her female colleagues replaced by the blonde of the moment, while the male presenters’ wrinkles give them gravitas.
Charlie Fallon works in the extraordinary art gallery and shop run by Ingrid’s husband. But her life is ruled by her old mother, once a famous feminist, now the most traditional kind of dictatorial materfamilias.

Ingrid’s daughter’s friend, Natalie, is looking for the truth about her own mother - who died long ago, after making her friends swear that they would not impose her life as a burden on her daughter.

It’s vintage Kelly territory, full of misunderstandings and anger and warmth and cosiness and passion.

And it’s a book for those who believe in love. Who said romantic Ireland was dead and gone?

Publisher's site

Buy Once in a Lifetime on Amazon.co.uk

The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

Quercus €22.94
IF YOU want a book to take on your lifetime trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl who Played with Fire is the one. Better to load it on your Kindle or iPhone if possible, though, because it’s a huge thing.
Larsson, a Swedish investigative journalist, brought his thriller trilogy to his publisher and promptly died of a heart attack at 50, is a hellish loss to literature.
The characters are the same as in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first of the series, but they’ve grown up. Lisbeth Salander, genius hacker and a paragon of body art, is wandering the world, discarding her nipple and tongue rings but (weirdly) getting her boobs done.
Mikael Blomkvist, editor of Millennium magazine, is preparing to publish a book about sex trafficking - as Larsson put it, “the finances of rape”.
Salander discovers that this probe revisits her own violent past. When a series of brutal murders happens, she’s right in the frame, and becomes a tabloid star as Sweden’s answer to Psycho Killer.
The tension torques tighter and tighter, there’s a shock with every page you turn, and the characters are tightly written and very likeable. The best thriller I’ve read in ages.
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.