Reviews: Viral; 13 Minutes; A Savage Hunger; Penance; The Last Good Kiss

Conventional writerly wisdom demands that the reader's attention be grabbed with an arresting opening line. Helen Fitzgerald has more than honoured this in her new novel Viral (Faber & Faber, £12.99). "I sucked twelve cocks in Magaluf," announces 18-year-old Su. "So far, twenty-three thousand and ninety-six people have seen me do this."

But Virginal Su has never performed oral sex before; she doesn’t drink or swear; she is a Good Girl. It should be her wild, bullying sister Leah on that screen, and indeed, in the film that has been uploaded to the internet, Leah can be seen in the background of the nightclub cheering Su on. In the aftermath, Su takes the ferry to Barcelona, leaving Leah to face the rage of their formidable mother Ruth, a sheriff on the Ayrshire court circuit.

The fallout is grim – Su loses her place in medical school, Ruth is removed from the bench and Leah is stricken with shame for the significant part she played. And then family tragedy strikes, leaving Ruth no alternative but to pursue revenge against the man who shot the film: someone must pay.

For a good two-thirds of its length, Viral feels intoxicatingly vital, alive and contemporary. Ripped-from-the-headlines issues like revenge porn, internet disgrace and the pernicious stereotyping of "good" and "bad" girls are dramatised through the volatile relationships between the two sisters and their imperious mother.

Ruth is a splendidly drawn portrait of an attractive, overbearing, faintly ripe west of Scotland bourgeois (“what clever child would select drama over chemistry?”), and Fitzgerald writes with salty wit and tremendous verve.

If I found the mechanics of the last third of the book a cumbersome letdown, it might have been in part due to the exigencies of the genre; the upbeat ending feels unearned, however, and almost undermines the seriousness of what has gone before.

Sarah Pinborough's 13 Minutes (Gollancz, £16.99), marketed as a psychological YA thriller, is sophisticated and twisty enough to please adults of all ages. Tasha and Becca were best friends forever, but when puberty struck, Tasha dropped her dumpy geek friend like a stone. Three years later, Becca still has to pinch herself that 19-year-old guitarist Aiden is her boyfriend, but she misses the charismatic Tasha, whose new friends are Hayley and Jenny: the Barbies, everyone calls them.

When Tasha is rescued from a lake, having been dead for 13 minutes, Becca pays a dutiful visit to her hospital bed. But there was more than a little Trouble in Barbie Paradise – Jenny and Hayley’s texts reveal they wish their best friend had died. Tasha regains consciousness and quickly draws Becca back into her orbit, much to the consternation of the Barbies and of Hannah, the doormat friend Tasha secretly despises. Before long, one girl is dead, another two are charged with her murder and Tasha finds herself reviled by the entire school.

13 Minutes is expertly plotted and paced, but what makes it especially satisfying is the complexity of the characterisation: the Barbies are seen in the round. Tasha is meticulously revealed in all her monstrousness and Becca herself is a compelling but not always likeable hero. Subtle and wise about friendship and betrayal, Pinborough is a writer to watch.

Friendship and betrayal among the young also lie at the heart of A Savage Hunger (Headline, £13.99), the fourth entry in Claire McGowan's consistently impressive Northern Ireland-set Paula Maguire series. Alice Morgan (22) was last seen at a deconsecrated church on the remote rural outskirts of Ballyterrin; 35 years previously, at the height of the hunger strikes, Yvonne O'Neill went missing from the same spot; a bloodstained photo of Yvonne, who is blonde and thin, just like Alice, is found on the altar. Are the two cases connected? Or is the truth about the troubled Alice, whose history of anorexia and parental neglect is threaded throughout the narrative, to be found among the friends she made at Oakdale University, a private college whose students all have a past they need to hide?

In any successful crime series, the off-stage elements are as absorbing as the investigations; in this case, Paula’s attitude toward her imminent nuptials is decidedly ambivalent, which turns out to be more than justified. McGowan delivers a complex, disturbing, resonant novel that remains light on its feet and immensely entertaining.

"We'll never get through this. We're all broken now." So says 15-year-old Maddie Douglas after a policeman's knock brings news of the death in Thailand of her elder brother, Rob, in Kate O'Riordan's haunting Penance (Constable, £19.99). Maddie insists that Rob's death was her fault and thereafter descends into an inferno of drugs and girl gangs, until she is violently assaulted, hospitalised and sectioned. As part of her recovery, she and her mother Rosalie attend a bereavement group session, where they encounter a stunningly beautiful 19-year-old, Jed Cousins.

Soon Maddie falls for Jed, and if her parents have any unease about a sexual relationship between the two, the transformative effect it has on their daughter dispels any doubts. But when Rosalie finds herself dreaming obsessively of Jed, she begins to worry, and when, while her husband is away, she lets him move into their house and sleep in her dead son’s bed, the die is cast.

There are echoes of Pasolini's Theorem here, along with the pervasive influence of Daphne du Maurier, but O'Riordan has her own distinctive style and an assured grasp of the dark material. Atmospheric, all too believable and at times absolutely terrifying, Penance is spellbinding.

Helen Fitzgerald might have won the opening line laurels for 2016, but if we expand the contest to include the past 50 years, James Crumley's reissued The Last Good Kiss (Black Swan, £8.99) must surely take the top prize:

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Traherne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”

Crumley was a crucial influence on the new writers of the Nineties (including Ian Rankin, who contributes a fine introduction here), in part because, as he put it, “I wrote the novel against the genre and found myself captured by it”.

The rhythms of Crumley's prose owe a debt to the Chandler of The Long Goodbye, but the texture is closer to Robert Altman's 1973 film, with the Californian summer darkening, the unquiet ghosts of the counter-culture walking abroad and the shadow of Vietnam all over. A former Iowa student and friend of Richard Yates, Crumley had the hell-raising aura of a Hemingway; his books wouldn't sit well on a gender studies reading list, but he was a marvellous writer, and The Last Good Kiss is his masterpiece.

Declan Hughes is the author of the Ed Loy series. His latest book is All The Things You Are