{"id":6709,"date":"2016-03-24T11:44:56","date_gmt":"2016-03-24T11:44:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=6709"},"modified":"2016-03-29T11:45:23","modified_gmt":"2016-03-29T11:45:23","slug":"march-crime-round-up-by-n-j-cooper-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=6709","title":{"rendered":"March Crime Round-Up by N. J. Cooper"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A Savage Hunger by Claire McGowan<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Headline<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

Shot Through the Heart by Isabelle Grey<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Quercus<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

Siren by Annemarie Neary<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Hutchinson<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

The Steel Kiss by Jeffery Deaver<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Hodder & Stoughton UK\/Grand Central US<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Claire McGowan becomes more assured with each novel in her Paula Maguire series, tracing the dangerous trails left in the aftermath of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.\u00a0 Here all kinds of ordinary words carry at least twice their normal weight:\u00a0 disappeared; hunger; punishment; truth; vengeance; justice.<\/p>\n

Paula is a forensic psychologist, working with the police, coming to terms with the disappearance (and perhaps death) of her mother many years ago, the ambiguous paternity of her two-year-old daughter, Maggie, and her dread of the formal wedding that will link her for ever to the man Maggie calls Daddy.\u00a0 In this outing, Paula is called to advise on the disappearance of a student, whose three best university friends can’t help.\u00a0 Worryingly, Alice was last seen in the church where another young woman, who looked very like her, disappeared thirty-odd years ago.\u00a0 With Alice has gone the church’s famous relic:\u00a0 the finger bone of Saint Blannad, protector of the hungry.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

With flashbacks to the 1980s, when ten men starved themselves to death inside Long Kesh prison, A Savage Hunger<\/em> raises more questions than it answers about the Troubles and offers shocking insights into emotional manipulation, selfishness, and the exploitation of other people’s bodies that some men believe is their right.\u00a0 This is a powerful and disturbing novel.<\/p>\n

Isabelle Grey also explores the dangerous consequences of vengeance and tribal loyalties in Shot through the Heart<\/em>, but these tribes are quite different from the men and women of Northern Ireland.\u00a0 Grey’s DI Grace Fisher is confronted with a spree shooting on Christmas Day in Essex.\u00a0 A lone gunman kills a police officer, then four other people, before shooting himself.\u00a0 Grace must not only untangle the killer’s psychology but also track down the underworld gunsmith who provided the weapon and take on the powerful Police Federation.\u00a0 As always, Grey’s \"\"<\/a>research is impeccable, her writing is crisp, and her understanding of human distress adds depth to an excellent police procedural.<\/p>\n

Back in Ireland, Annemarie Neary’s Siren<\/em> deals with another aspect of life after the Troubles.\u00a0 In this case, it is the reinvention of the IRA as straight politicians that forms the backdrop to a fast-moving novel with a vulnerable woman at all kinds of risk.\u00a0 We meet Roisin both as a young teenager during the Troubles and now, as a woman of means and a determination to assuage her own guilt by exposing that of people even worse than she feels herself to be.\u00a0 If her younger self seems a little more na\u00efve than anyone growing up in Belfast could possibly have been, she is nevertheless an interesting character.\u00a0 And it is easy to sympathize with the vengeance she wants to achieve.<\/p>\n

Jeffery Deaver knows all about the passion for vengeance \u2013 or justice.\u00a0 His latest thriller has quadriplegic Lincoln Rhyme separating himself from \"\"<\/a>the police to concentrate on teaching and private clients.\u00a0 While his long-term partner, Amelia Sachs, tracks a serial killer, Rhyme and his new intern are busy trying to find someone to sue for the death of a man who fell through a gap in an escalator and was chewed up by the machinery below.\u00a0 Coincidentally, Sachs was on the scene and plunged down to try to save the man, thereby losing the suspect she was tracking, so that both investigations intertwine.\u00a0 Deaver is an expert in giving information without ever boring, which when the information in question is about the law of tort is pretty clever.\u00a0 He also keeps the pages turning faster than \"\"<\/a>almost anyone else and is an absolute master of misdirection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by N.J. Cooper<\/p>\n

Grey’s DI Grace Fisher is confronted with a spree shooting on Christmas Day in Essex. A lone gunman kills a police officer, then four other people, before shooting himself. Grace must not only untangle the killer’s psychology but also track down the underworld gunsmith who provided the weapon and take on the powerful Police Federation. As always, Grey’s research is impeccable, her writing is crisp, and her understanding of human distress adds depth to an excellent police procedural […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6709"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6732,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6709\/revisions\/6732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}