Punchy and energetic thriller is worth half-a-dozen Girl on the Train knock-offs

Rising Irish talent Jo Spain takes a break from her Inspector Tom Reynolds series for this one-off thriller, which spins on a clever and unusual premise. As the title suggests, the book begins with a confession, so we know whodunnit from the outset. The fun and excitement lie in discovering why.

Spain (below) opens with disgraced banker Harry McNamara and wife Julie watching TV. He’s narrowly escaped prison for dodgy dealings at the fictional HM Capital.

They’ve been slowly reassembling the broken pieces of their life, but that all goes to hell when a man strolls into their lavish south Dublin home, swinging a golf club, and knocks seven shades out of Harry.

A few hours later, the attacker presents himself at the nearest garda station. JP Carney admits assaulting McNamara, but claims he has no idea why he did it. Was it a psychotic episode — and, therefore, is Carney not guilty by virtue of diminished responsibility?

Gardai, psychiatrists, DPP: all are happy to take this on face value. But investigating detective Alice Moody isn’t sure.

She’s a great creation: a large, brassy woman, foulmouthed and a talented detective with a high clearance rate. And Moody smells something rotten in the mysterious JP.

Spain tells her story through that common modern device in crime fiction of overlapping narrators: in this case, Julie, Moody and JP. It’s a testament to her skill as a writer that each voice is distinct.

Not as welcome is how Spain also flips between first-person and third-person and between present tense and past tense.

Now, stylistically, there’s nothing special about The Confession. It has that sort of flat, indistinct style that’s everywhere in crime novels nowadays. You could mix ‘n’ match passages from this with a hundred similar books and not notice. For someone who loves both crime and literary fiction, this is a little disappointing.

All that said: as an entertainment, The Confession works extremely well. I really did fly through it in two or three sittings. I think it’s mainly because, unlike many of these type of novels, Spain’s is fast-paced and full of incident. Nor does she drag it out with lengthy dialogue mired in plot exposition.

The Confession is a punchy and energetic thriller in a world of tedious Girl on the Train knock-offs.