New crime fiction: Shot in the arm for the hackneyed serial killer yarn

The serial killer yarn is probably the most hackneyed of crime fiction's sub-genres, which is likely why Catherine Ryan Howard, arguably the most inventive of the current crop of Irish crime writers when it comes to subverting the conventions, decided to give it a shot in the arm. The Nothing Man (Corvus, £14.99) is the title of Howard's latest novel as well as the book-within-a-book (which comes complete with its own ISBN number), a true crime account written by Eve Black about the murder of her family in 2001.

Eve’s book, which is “the story of Cork’s most famous crime”, is being read by Jim, the media-dubbed Nothing Man, who is initially horrified to hear that his old crimes are being raked over, but who grows increasingly aware that the old thrill is being rekindled. Has Eve put herself in harm’s way by writing The Nothing Man? Or is that the whole point of the exercise?

A deftly blended composite of the serial killer, psychological thriller and true crime narratives, The Nothing Man is a compelling novel that brilliantly deconstructs the genre’s cliches of the charming sociopath.

Set in rural Mayo in 1920, Aidan McQuade's The Undiscovered Country (Unbound, £8.99) is narrated by Michael McAlinden, an IRA man recently seconded to the newly established Irish Republican Police. When a young boy is discovered dead in mysterious circumstances, McAlinden and his superior, Eamon Gleason, are commissioned to investigate.

When I think it won’t hurt too much, I imagine the children I will not have

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Ridiculed as “two bogmen trying to emulate the detectives of Dublin Castle or Scotland Yard”, the pair aren’t short of suspects; unfortunately, they include the parish priest and their officer commanding, with no established protocol in the matter of procedure complicating matters further.

McAlinden, whose legal studies in Galway have been interrupted by the war, is a little too fond of his literary references (anything from Sophocles to Peter Pan, by way of Hamlet and War and Peace), but his conversational style is humorously irreverent and profane, which allows McQuade to sidestep the awkward formalities that can suffocate a historical narrative. The result is a smart and pacy debut that details a historical period, and policing context, that deserves further exploration.

Set in a small Texas town, Julia Heaberlin's We Are All the Same in the Dark (Penguin, £14.99) centres on Odette Tucker, the latest in a long line of cops, and a woman obsessed with discovering the truth about the disappearance of Trumanell Branson some years previously. When Odette discovers a young one-eyed girl, Angel, sheltering at the home of Trumanell's brother Wyatt, things come to a head – Wyatt, an ex-con, is a suspected serial killer and infamous as the focus of a recent TV docu-series.

What follows is an absorbing account of a town’s complicity in the tragedy that befell Trumanell Branson: Odette isn’t simply striving to establish the facts, but trying to come to terms with how her own history is inextricably bound up with that of the missing girl. (“[Finn] knew how much the night Trumanell was threaded in my own story.”) Halfway through, however, the story abruptly switches away from Odette’s perspective to introduce a second narrator, which delivers a wholly implausible conclusion to the story.

SA Crosby's Blacktop Wasteland (Headline, £14.99) revolves around Beauregard "Bug" Montage, a mechanic by day and a drag-racer (and occasional getaway driver) by night. An ex-juvenile delinquent lured into the fabled one last heist that will allow him pay his mounting debts, family man Bug discovers himself "caught between a wannabe Pablo Escobar chopping motherfuckers up and putting them in grease buckets and a redneck Walter White".

Blacktop Wasteland is an effective neo-noir that skilfully ratchets up the tension as it rumbles towards its inevitable conclusion

Not that Bug has a whole lot of options: “Listen,” he tells his teenage son, “when you’re a black man in America you live with the weight of people’s low expectations on your back every day.” Racism, functional poverty and those low expectations all play their part in Bug’s dilemma – although once the reader realises that most of his financial issues could be resolved if only Bug would agree to sell his beloved muscle car, sympathy for his plight begins to seep away.

That said, Blacktop Wasteland is an effective neo-noir that skilfully ratchets up the tension as it rumbles towards its inevitable conclusion.

DA Mishani's Three (Riverrun, £11.99) is an unusual psychological thriller, which engages with the serial killer tropes from the victims' perspectives. Translated by Jessica Cohen, the novel opens in a suburb of Tel Aviv, with Orna surfing a dating site for divorced singles. When she agrees to meet with Gil, a lawyer, she decides he's "unexciting" and "nothing too special", but a tentative romance begins, even though Orna (and the reader) senses that something isn't quite right about her new beau.

Shortlisted for the Sapir Prize – the “Israeli Booker” – Three is less obviously a crime novel than Mishani’s previous offerings (most of which have been police procedurals), although much of what makes his novels so compelling can be found here: even as Gil’s personality is gradually revealed through the women he preys upon, Mishani is much more fascinated by the women themselves, and concerned with detailing and celebrating the minutiae of their lives.

A slow-burning psychological thriller, Three will reward the patient reader.

Declan Burke is a journalist and author. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)