Irish Daily Mail

Violence that has no bruises

- GEOFFREY WANSELL

KEEPER by Jessica Moor (Viking €17.99)

THIS debut from Cambridge graduate Moor is vastly impressive and also shines a light on violence and abuse directed at women.

At its heart is the admirable Katie Straw, who works as a counsellor at a local women’s refuge — as did the author — and so is no stranger to abusive relationsh­ips. But nothing could have prepared her for what happened next.

When her body is pulled from the river at a local beauty spot, police believe she committed suicide. But DS Daniel Whitworth is unconvince­d, and starts an investigat­ion.

The story is told partly in flashbacks to the women’s refuge, alongside detectives’ enquiries in the present.

What emerges is a portrait of that most contempora­ry of issues — coercive control. Deeply affecting and superbly told, it demands to be read.

AFTER DARK by Dominic Nolan (Headline €24.20)

A YEAR ago, Nolan stormed on to the scene with his savage debut, Past Life, which introduced DS Abigail Boone, investigat­ing sex traffickin­g. As that story ended, the courageous Boone had been kept captive for four days, and escaped only after seeing a friend die.

Traumatise­d, she suffered retrograde amnesia, was thrown out of the force in disgrace and imprisoned.

In this sequel, she sets out to hunt down those she believes are responsibl­e, and help former colleagues find who might have held a young girl captive her whole life.

Boone reveals a world of paedophile­s and sex trafficker­s hiding in respectabl­e society, in a dark tale that suggests Nolan is set to become the new Michael Connelly.

ARE SNAKES NECESSARY? by Brian De Palma and Susan Lehman

(Hard Case Crime €24.20)

LEGENDARY film director De Palma (The Untouchabl­es and Dressed To Kill) joins forces with a New York Times editor to write this engaging debut. It’s pure pulp fiction, with a cast of characters who wouldn’t be out of place in a Quentin Tarantino movie. Lee Rogers, a US Senator, is cheating on his wife with a young videograph­er who is covering his campaign. Inevitably, rumours start and he asks his ‘fixer’ to sort out the mess. The videograph­er flees to Paris, where she meets a photograph­er who is working on a new version of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and who has been having an affair with the wife of one of Las Vegas’s richest men.

The stories quickly coalesce, with justice handed out in ever more lurid forms.

Told with great panache, it is richly entertaini­ng, and the title is a homage to Preston Sturges’s film The Lady Eve, where Henry Fonda reads a book with this same title.

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