Recent Reads Part 4
I hope you’ve been enjoying this tour through the books I’ve particularly liked over the last year or so. Today, we’re back in fiction territory.
I’m going to start with an Australian/Irish writer Dervla McTiernan who made a huge splash with her debut The Ruin, a clever crime novel set in modern-day Ireland. I read The Ruin and its sequel The Scholar and enjoyed both, but I think this third entry in the Cormac Reilly series is the best so far.
Brooding, obsessive Cormac is a police detective for whom things never seem to go right. He has a talent for making powerful enemies that has done him and his career no favors.
In this book, he’s been sent off to a dead-end station in the backblocks of rural Ireland. Even worse, he has to work with his estranged father who has an idiosyncratic way of administering justice. But even in Roundstone, evil has a hold. This small town is riddled with corruption that leads to theft and murder – and the only man who can see the connections is, you guessed it, our hero Cormac! This is a really gripping crime novel that I had trouble putting down.
My next choice is also a crime novel, the first in a new series featuring DS Alexandra Cupidi, a detective from Scotland Yard who is exiled to a dead end job on the isolated Kent Coast because she’s upset some powerful people. Shades of The Good Turn!
Salt Lane is a nail-biting thriller that hinges on the flood of illegal immigrants to Britain and how criminal elements exploit them for nefarious purposes. In her new posting, Alexandra becomes involved in kidnappings, baffling murders, and poisonous local politics as she battles to solve the spate of murders in this supposedly quiet backwater.
I really enjoyed this one. Alexandra is a great character – dogged and determined to do the right thing and ready to put herself at risk for people the world hasn’t exactly treated kindly. I’m looking forward to reading more of her adventures.
For a change of pace, my next choice is a brilliantly imagined historical novel set during the Roman invasion of Britain in the first century AD. I heard Ilka Tampke talk about her book Skin when I attended the Historical Novelists Society Australasia conference last year and I thought how fascinating the story sounded. Well, I wasn’t wrong. This one is packed with vivid historical detail and great characters in high-stakes situations.
The heroine Ailia is an outcast because she was born without the all-important skin, the totemic allegiance that determines a person’s status and role within the Caer Cad. But Ailia has the protection of the powerful Mothers, the tribal spirits, and she also has her courage and intelligence and heart to guide her to her place in the world. Unfortunately, history is cruel. Her place in the world is threatened by the incomers from Rome who are poised to destroy the power of the Druids and the rich and complex society Ailia strives to preserve.
There’s danger, romance, suspense, magic and adventure in this one. Highly recommended. I’m really looking forward to reading book 2 in the Song of the Kendra series, Songwoman.
My final recommendation this month (more to come next month) is a fantasy novel, Beyond the Shadowed Earth by Joanna Ruth Meyer. If you’ve been reading this column for a while, you’ll remember I absolutely loved JRM’s earlier book Echo North.
Beyond the Shadowed Earth shares many of the qualities that I loved in Echo North. A rich fairy tale atmosphere, a gutsy heroine with a lot to learn about herself and the world around her, a brilliantly realized world of magic, and danger and adventure, not to mention a really nice romance.
The flawed heroine, Eda, makes a heinous bargain with the gods in return for power, then discovers that the price is beyond what she’s ready to pay. She has to undertake a perilous quest to restore balance and justice to her world and in the process, she just might find an unlikely redemption. Loved this one! The writing is beautiful and the story is so compelling and imaginative.