WHODUNIT: JACK BATTEN

The Ghosts of Galway By Ken Bruen Mysterious Press, 338 pages, $36.50

Jack Taylor, the closest thing to a private eye in all of Galway, sums up the present state of his health: “a sodden drunk with mutilated fingers, a hearing aid, a limp, and an on/off affair with prescription drugs.” Not that his miserable condition slows Jack to a standstill. Throughout the latest book in the dark and often hilarious Taylor series, Jack keeps bugging Ireland’s mountain-climbing team to sign him up for its next Everest expedition. He’s not kidding. Meanwhile, in his less delusional moments, Jack is hired to hunt down an 800 A.D. tome called The Red Book, which is infamous as the first true work of heresy. What follows is the sort of chaos endemic to all Taylor adventures: free-form episodes buoyant in insult, inspired profanity and colourful confusion.

The Second Sister By Claire Kendal Harper Collins, 496 pages, $22.99

This is a thriller with intelligence and a high creep factor, a genre that’s difficult to get just right. The English writer Claire Kendal’s version comes close to perfection.

It features Ella Brooke as the narrator and sleuth. Ella is 30 and runs a support group for the families of the victims of crime in the city of Bath. Ella’s older sister, Miranda, has been missing for 10 years and assumed by practically everyone except her family to be a murder victim. Now, in the present, circumstances put Ella on the investigative search for Miranda’s whereabouts, dead or alive, and if the former, for her killer.

The investigation packs in all the elements that make both Ella and readers suck in their breath in fear and horror. There are false leads, red herrings, uncovered secrets, multiple suspects, loads of dread and all the other elements that, creepily, make the book work so successfully.