No Time for Goodbye by Linwood Barclay

Orion €11.95

CYNTHIA wakes up alone in the house, the night after her first drunken binge with a bad boy. Her family are gone without a trace.
Her father came last night and dragged her out of the car where she was canoodling with Vince Fleming, son of a local criminal.
Now, as she stands in the kitchen and wonders where everyone’s gone, she begins to be frightened.
It’s a great beginning to a story that rattles along at speed.
Years later, Cynthia goes on TV, taking part in an unsolved mysteries programme, in the forlorn hope that she might hear some news of the lost ones.
But it’s as if she’s thrust a stick into a pool full of alligators. There’s a message saying her parents forgive them. A car appears, following Cynthia’s little girl to school at walking pace.
And the aunt who brought her up tells a long-kept secret to Cynthia’s husband.
They hire a detective, who turns up some news of his own.
Cynthia’s father is a man of mystery. No driver’s licence picture, no social security records. Can he have been an FBI agent? On a witness protection programme? A spy?
All this is great. But it gets to the point where you want to echo the character who wails “How long is this going to go on?” – or words to that effect.
The story has a belly like a poisoned pup. Somewhere in the middle, when the family haven’t turned up, clue after clue keeps appearing, and every few chapters there’s a sinister dialogue by unidentified people, you get the itch to skip to the end.
But it’s worth it for the buildup. And while the end isn’t that satisfying – the solution works technically, but not emotionally – it all wraps up.
A great book for waiting for the airport to fix their radar, though. Long enough and exciting enough that it’ll last you for the few days.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller

Canongate

SKIP immediately to Part 2. I’ll tell you what happens in Part 1. You can go back and read it later.
Pippa Lee is a madonna, the calm and competent wife of Herb Lee, America’s most famous publisher.
Pippa – still in her 50s – and Herb, who’s now in his 80s, have moved to a wealthy retirement estate known locally as Wrinkle Village.
Their friends Sam (great novelist) and his partner Moira (greatish poet on the lookout for a nicer but still famous man) are their constant companions.
OK, that’s it.
Now for the good stuff, as you turn hastily to page 61, where it goes into the voice of Pippa herself, and plunges into her chaotic, desperate youth.
Hilarious and stunningly sad – you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll say “Oh, shit, no!” – it’s a roller-coaster ride through the bohemia of the mid-century.
And Rebecca Miller should know her stuff. Daughter of Death of a Salesman playwright Arthur Miller, wife of Daniel Day-Lewis, daughter-in-law of poet Cecil Day-Lewis, she must have spent her youth mobbed up with the literary aristocracy.
Not just literary – heavens, before she was born, her dad had been married to Marilyn Monroe!
So with jaw open, as you’re whizzing through the book laughing and crying, you’re also saying “Who is that?” and coming up with crazed theories.
From the stagey suicide of Herb’s gorgeous first wife to Pippa’s dealings with her speed-freak mother (still giving her baby-bottles at 16). Hmm, hm. Who can this be?
It’s a book that could sadly go unnoticed until it’s filmed – already on the cards, starring Robin Wright Penn, Keanu Reeves and Winona Rider – and then take off. Make sure you’re in before the crowd; you’ll be passing it to your friends.
But skip that first part.

Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich

Headline €15.99

ACE detective Stephanie Plum’s got the blues. At least, she has, along with her colleagues, after they open a briefcase booby-trapped with blue dye, which explodes all over them.
The ditsy but still ace skip-tracer is off on another off-centre adventure with ex-’ho Lula by her side, and Plum’s complex love life providing the salsa.
In the fourteenth of the series, they’re on the trail of $9 million in stolen money. As always in Plum’s New Jersey homeland, everyone’s a cousin.
As she climbs out of another window, leaving another dead guy behind her, she muses that it’s lucky the cop answering her call is Eddie Gazarra. “We’d grown up together and he’d married my cousin, Shirley the Whiner.”
There are plenty of side issues to spice up her life. Lula has decided that Tank, her giant ex-special-forces sweetie, has proposed, and is planning the wedding. Tank is crashing down in a faint.
Schoolkid Mario (in the game Minionfire he’s Zook, a major mage who’s stalking the griefer (say what?) and watching out for the wood elves) is in Plum’s care, because his mom has skipped bail after robbing a liquor store.
Dom Rizzi, Zook’s anger-management-troubled uncle, is out to get Plum’s sweetie, Joe Morelli, because Joe may be Zook’s real father.
Plum’s grandma joins Zook in Minionfire to seek the griefer, then along come her aged pals, plus Mooner, Plum’s stoner former schoolmate.
After that it gets complicated.
As funny as a barrel of monkeys – oh yes, there’s a monkey in there too, as well as a country rock star turned TV investigator – this is a triumph for Evanovich.
If your best pal has broken up with her sweetiepie and needs some cheering, go straight to the bookshop and buy this book for her.

People of 1916

The Absent Wife by Karen Gillece

Hachette
A GIRL with a lovely name: Star Anise Quick. She never knew who her father was – her mother, Jean, told her Africa was her father, and all the children of Africa were her brothers and sisters.
When Jean is dying, though, she finally tells Star that her father is Leo Quick, an Irish portrait painter.
Star makes her way to Dalkey, and everything changes.
Leo has brought up his two children, Silvia and James. He didn’t know Jean was pregnant when she left, and when Star phones, he’s just had a stroke.
He’s been eaten away for years by a secret he can’t unravel: why did Jean leave him and their children?
James is a TV celeb who’s trying to get all the wealth he can generate up his nose.
Silvia is the good girl who minds her dad as he needs it, but has her mother’s addictive liking for uncommitted sex.
Gillece’s delicate writing unfolds all these layers of stories, dancing back and forth between past and present.
She layers in current news stories – Natascha Kampusch and the British teacher who was jailed for calling a teddy bear Muhammad make appearances – and drops in luscious scents and flavours.
As the family reclaim the daughter and sister they didn’t know about, they’re also reclaiming the wife and mother who disappeared.
For Star, and for Leo’s close friend Hugh, it’s another reclamation, of the wrong that couldn’t be righted, and the bond that couldn’t be broken.
Gillece gets better with every book. She’s finding her style as a writer of contemplative, incisive novels, but she hasn’t hit her pace quite yet.
This is a book for the bedside, to be savoured and talked about with friends.

The Bloomsday Dead by Adrian McKinty

Serpent’s Tail
IT’S such a great idea – a thriller based on Ulysses.
And it starts out well: “State LY Plum P Buck Mulligan” reads the note handed to the hotel shamus.
It translates thus: “In stateroom LY (that is, the fiftieth floor, suite Y), a Plum (in other words, a drunk American) named Mr P Buck was creating a Mulligan (ie a disturbance).
And it ends well, in Joycean tradition, with that trailing sibilant “Yes.”
The middle is more problematic. Michael Forsyth, McKinty’s hero, is the kind of Northerner who wears crossed Union Jack and Red Hand in the fanlight of his little mind, and absolutely hates all things Irish.
“In my eyes the Garda Síochána was only a notch or two above the Irish Army and, as an ex-member of the British Army, I had nothing but contempt for that body,” he writes.
“Any squaddie worth his salt would join the Irish Guards in London; any peeler up to scuds would get into one of the big metropolitan police forces across the water. Irish coppers and soldiers were second-rate.”
Not, perhaps, the perfect note to strike if you’re aiming to lure Joyceans, who adore Dublin, Ireland and all about the country.
Between ‘plump Buck Mulligan’ and ‘yes’, it’s an orgy of killing, interspersed with paranoid ravings, self-hatred and a bit more killing.
The effect is curiously anaesthetic. After a while the reader stops bothering to notice new characters – after all, Mike’s going to kill them in a minute.
Reading, you get the feeling that McKinty is ‘writing away from’ his subject – that he really wants to write about something else. From the wrongness of his take on the IRA characters (hellfire and respectability), I suspect that he wants to be writing about the UDA.
If you like thrillers with a high body count, this is for you.

The Likeness by Tana French

Hachette Books Ireland

PROPERTY and identity: the two main reasons for murder.
Many the soon-to-be widower screams “You’re not who I thought you were” as he grabs up the knife.
And the division of the home and the savings is eased by about-to-be widows who kill to inherit all rather than half.
In Tana French’s second novel, it’s more complicated.
Detective Cassie Maddox – one of the central characters in French’s first book, the magnificent In the Woods – discovers that she’s a victim of identity theft.
Or rather that ‘Lexie Madison’, a fake persona Cassie was using when working undercover, is now the identity being used by another woman.
And that woman has been found dead in a ruined cottage in the wilds of Wicklow.
Spookily, she’s been stabbed, just as Cassie was stabbed by a speed freak when she was using the ‘Lexie’ identity to work undercover.
Cassie is sent in to take the dead woman’s place – she didn’t really die, they tell friends of ‘Lexie’, she was in a coma.
She finds herself in a complex household, almost a commune, shared by students in a stunning half-ruined Georgian house in the mountains that one has inherited.
The Likeness has a bit of the second book syndrome about it. It’s draggy at times, with slow narration and not enough happening.
But a writer with French’s power can still bring the reader along, with scary details and mystery within mystery.
As Cassie becomes ‘Lexie’ and her involvement with Lexie’s friends grows, she’s living two lives. In one, she’s a detective acquiring inside knowledge – ‘Lexie’ was pregnant – and in the other she’s living with Lexie’s friends, not knowing who may be the killer.
Fascinating and terrifying; don’t put the lights out after closing this.