Fiction: Claire Watson, an ex-detective from Belfast, is on holiday in the south of France with her young child and old friends Isabel and George when her past, driving a red convertible, crashes into her.
It has to be said this chance meeting with handsome John Rock, the man she interviewed as part of his wife's murder case in Belfast years ago, might stretch readers' credulity. But it's worth sticking with the story, which swiftly evolves into a romantic Nancy Drew adventure for adults as Claire discovers the link between the handsome stranger and a case she thought was long closed.
The mystery is complicated by the fact that Claire - with a broken marriage behind her - is soon falling for John Rock despite George's disapproval of both the man and the romance.
Encouraged by Isabel, strait-laced Claire - the cornet-playing daughter of a Salvation Army mother - finds the bar-owner irresistible. As she gets more deeply involved, the truth of what happened years ago bubbles inevitably to the surface.
The twists and turns at the end are expertly handled by McAuley, who was hailed as "the new Maeve Binchy" after her first novel, Singing Bird. This second novel, with its distinctive narrative style, should see the former BBC reporter lose the "new Binchy" tag and establish her own individual presence in the busy romantic fiction genre. An easy summer read with hidden depths (the meeting point in the title is from the brooding Louis MacNiece poem of the same name), McAuley's second novel will not disappoint those many readers who discovered they couldn't put down her debut.
Róisín Ingle is an Irish Times journalist
Meeting Point by Roisin McAuley Review, 312pp. £10.99
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