Thriller: The Guilty Heart is Julie Parsons's fourth novel. Like her other books, it's not a very nice book, but it's a very good book. You rarely get the two things together: niceness and goodness are phenomenon which vary by about 60 orders of magnitude.
Parsons's central character, Nick Cassidy, is nice, but he's not good. He's living in New Orleans, teaching art, drinking heavily, visiting strip clubs. It is 10 years since his eight-year-old son, Owen, went missing from near his home in Dún Laoghaire. He has never been found. On the 10th anniversary of his son's disappearance, Nick decides to return home. The Guilty Heart is about what happens when he returns to Ireland, and what happened back then when "the whole perfect, cosy, neatly constructed edifice came tumbling down".
Nick's wife, Susan, is a doctor, a cancer specialist. She still lives in their old house. Most of their neighbours have moved on and moved away since the disappearance. All except one: Chris, the son of their next-door neighbours, the Gouldings. Chris had been friends with Marianne, who was Nick and Susan's childminder. Owen was supposed to have been with Marianne when he disappeared. Marianne has blamed herself for what happened, has gone mad in fact. Nick feels guilty too: while his wife was at work, and while Marianne was supposed to be looking after Owen, he was with his lover.
As the plot builds towards its appalling dénouement, Parsons handles each character, each scene and indeed each tiny piece of her complex narrative structure with characteristic tact and skill, constantly raising troubling questions in the reader's mind about the roles and motivations of the characters, and then successfully postponing the answers.
There is much deft use of flashback and foreshadowing, and there is an unusually engaging sub-plot about a female detective, Min Sweeney, who'd been a young officer on the initial investigation into Owen's disappearance, and who is now employed by the Garda's sexual offences unit, working on child Internet pornography.
In addition to her considerable technical accomplishments Parsons is also capable of the odd twist and turn of the poetic. But hers is no mere fancy prose: she ascends swiftly and successfully to the realms of the symbolic. She conjures up suburban menace, for example, using the darting figure of the fox, who is forever lurking in back gardens, feeding on scraps. She depicts an Ireland full of traffic jams and lap-top computers, in which everyone is tired, everyone is drifting, everyone is drinking, everyone is obsessed with sex, and no one knows their neighbours.
It's not very nice. But it's very realistic.
Ian Sansom's The Truth About Babies is published by Granta. His novel Ring Road will be published next yearIan Sansom