The Priest. Gerard O'Donovan. Sphere (2010)

A gripping thriller with two very engaging leading characters, a vivid supporting cast and a very well structured story. When the daughter of a prominent Spanish politician is brutally assaulted in Dublin, Detective Inspector Mike Mulchay, recently returned from a posing in Spain, is reluctantly drawn into the investigation. Detective Inspector Claire Brogan of the Sex Crimes unit does not welcome his involvement in the case and the investigation develops a strong internal Garda political aspect. Siobhan Fallon is a journalist who finds the story and is determined to follow it, as well as developing a credible relationship with DI Mulchay. The story twists and turns without ever lowering the tension, the reveals are cunning staged and timed and the climax is enjoyably melodramatic, the conclusion satisfyingly sharp.
Gerard O'Donovan has got all the elements of the story woven into a very engaging whole. Mike Mulchay and Siobhan Fallon are great characters, both ambitious professionals they manage to respect each others opposing agendas enough to make an entirely credible, if a little uneasy, couple. The swirl of internal politics within the Garda is a complicating factor that is handled with tremendous skill and care. The structure of the investigation, nicely counterpointed by the media story, effectively developed, none of it feels forced to accommodate a plot point.
The supporting cast are all lively and sharply drawn, they are more than walk on parts,they provide genuine force and momentum to to book by the way they act.
A nice aspect to the book is the minimal role played directly by the villain, the focus of the story is on the horrific actions, the victims and the investigation. He is given an interesting context, he never controls the story. A great read.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Jacques Audiard (Director). Artifical Eye (2005)

This is a very engaging drama that darts away from the expectations it sets up in a very satisfactory fashion. Thomas Seyer (Romain Duris) is a violent real estate broker, willing to resort to extreme methods to remove tenants from property and keeping them out. When he is offered the opportunity to audition as a concert pianist for his late mother's manager he comes into conflict with his father and his partners. His father (Niels Arestrup) is in the same business as Thomas, he wants Thomas to recover a debt he is owed by a Russian gangster, Minskov (Anton Yakovlev). Thomas's partners are unhappy with his being distracted by the music. The film juggles the two threads of the story with care, capturing Thomas's increasing frustration and impatience with his musical progress. The reveals are cleverly staged and the film builds to a savage,surprising and very satisfying conclusion.
Romain Duris is superb in the lead role, he has a ferocious charisma full of tightly wound and barely controlled energy. The conflict between the grip of the obligations of the present to his father and his partners and the possibility of a new life via music is vividly conveyed in his performance.
Niels Arestrup gives an equally outstanding performance of waning force and power, dependant on the son he loves while being a touch resentful of it. He wants Thomas to stick to the business as he needs him to help, the music is both a distraction and an unwelcome reminder of Thomas's mother. Linh Dan Pham delivers in a savagely difficult and unforgiving role with subtle dignity and care, she plays Miao Lin, the non-French speaking piano coach Thomas's hires to help him prepare for the audition.
The whole film has a taut atmosphere that never gives way, a great structure that brings the cast together in unexpected and engaging ways and delivers a great payoff, intriguing and very enjoyable.

If I Never See You Again. Niamh O'Connor. Transworld Ireland (2010)

A big angry heart and a very engaging lead character and strong momentum pretty much overcome an over reliance on genre stereotypes in plotting and casting. Newly promoted Detective Inspector Jo Birmingham finds a mutilated body while completing a training exercise. After being put in charge of the investigation she realises that it has links with some other brutal murders that also involved mutilations. Ryan Freeman, a crime reporter, is also pursuing a investigation concerning his daughter's abduction and eventual return. She had been kidnapped by a leading Dublin gangster who was one of the murder victims that Jo Birmingham had identified as part of a pattern. The two lines of inquiry are nicely set up before being knotted together in a brutal and effective fashion leading to a violent climax.
The biggest weakness in this story are that other than Jo Birmingham and Ryan Freeman the cast are one dimensional cut outs designed to push the plot forward as required. Dan Mason, Jo Birmingham's ex husband and current boss can never escape his purpose as a plot device to have any hope of independent life. The surrounding cast are given a little more air but never enough to free them. The plot is slightly more boilerplate serial killer than not, it does has some force, it does not quite manage the very difficult task of breathing fresh life into an much used idea.
What lifts up Jo and Ryan is also what lifts the entire book, there is a genuinely angry heart pulsing within this book, Jo is a really angry character, the plight of victims caught up in the coils of the Irish justice system drives her. This anger propels her into life as a character, she is involved a fight with the Dept of Justice that does not appear to be heavy handed editorialising by the author. Niamh O'Connor has created a genuine voice in Jo Birmingham and her struggle and cause seem natural and unforced. For Ryan the grief for his daughter is crisp and sharp, it gives him depth and weight. Rising above its limitations this is an engaging read.

Shifting Skin. Chris Simms. Orion Books (2006)

A very engaging and sharply written police procedural. Partially skinned bodies have been dumped around the Belle Vue area and Detective Inspector Jon Spicer is struggling to get a grip on the case. At the same time a battered woman felling from her home is sure she has heard a murder at the hotel she was sheltering at. She only has a card from an escort agency as proof and embarks on her own investigation when the police do not. Jon Spicer is assigned a new partner and together they start to find a trail to follow, unlicensed cosmetic surgery. The two investigations slowly start to draw together and overlap in a very satisfactory and effective climax.
Chris Simms has written a very well constructed crime story that stages it reveals with care and at the same time allows its cast to breathe and develop and deal with some very interesting issues. Rick Saville, Jon Spicers' new partner is gay and Chris Simms handles the story thread this leads to very nicely. Jon Spicer is a very macho character, it is not Rick's sexual orientation that bother him, it is his competence as a police officer. Once that is established the matter of his being gay is still relevant but minor. This allows Rick emerge as a rounded character rather than a token.
Fiona, the battered wife, slowly emerges as character, her investigation is as much as assertion of her control over her own life, long absent, as anything else. The way the threads of the story are drawn together and the horribly plausible well of hate and bile that lie behind the murders is expertly revealed. A gripping and very enjoyable story.

Ghost In The Shell:Man Machine Interface. Shirow Masamune (Writer & Artist). Dark Horse Magna (2005)

Wonderful, if not quite successful, ambitious full tilt science fiction busting with big ideas, humour and fantastic art. Motoko Aramaki, a counter-terrorist net security expert works for the giant Poseidon Industrial corporation. An attack at one of the companies facilities leads to greater puzzles and elusive enemy. Motoko is as much at home travelling the information lines of the net as she is in any of her cyborg bodies. She slips from one body and information nexus to another as she tracks the threat, along the way she encounters a entity from the Channelling Agency, a mysterious official organisation. As Motoko fights physical and cyber battles she draws closer to the extraordinary secret at the heart of the events.
Shirow Masamue's reach exceeds his grasp in this story, there is a wonderful density of detail matched against a flow of big ideas that does not quite cohere in a successful way. The details start to drown out the ideas and the ideas are not quite carried off with the force required. None of which detracts from the astounding journey that the story takes. The overall concept, of humans being equipped with cyber brains that have a constant connecting with a global cyber network, the significantly increased use of cyberisation of bodies blurring the lines of what is human is superbly exploited. Motoko is a an evolved creature,her physical bodies are all cyborgs, her consciousness, in essence her humanity or her ghost, is anchored in the infrastructure of the net.
This allows Shirow Masamune to have Motoko roam the globe easily, dropping into bodies storied at various locations to engage in stunning action set pieces. A propensity for panty shots is unfortunate and jarring. The cyber action is managed with explosive artwork that means that the information network is visualised in the most engaging and astounding way. The strategy of piling on the detail, including very funny footnotes from the creator, is effective for most of the story but becomes overwhelming at the end. As the big conclusion is approached the story falters instead of flying.
As a partial failure is is wildly more successful that most comics and extravagantly more successfully than than most science fiction, in comic form or not. The willingness to embrace and exploit the possibilities if both comics and science fiction is exhilarating and joyous, not to be missed.

Out of the Past. Director: Jacques Tourneur. RKO Radio Pictures (1947)

A superb film noir with a great cast, cleverly constructed plot and a bruised romantic heart. Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) answers a summons from Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), a gambler he had done a job for and had hoped to have left behind. On the journey to see Whit, Bailey tells his girlfriend the story of how he had been a private investigator hired by Whit to find Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), who had robbed and shot Whit. Bailey found Kathie and fell in love with her, their attempt to escape together from Whit had ended very badly and now Whit had found Bailey again. Whit wants Bailey to recover some papers for him, when Bailey finds that Kathie had returned to Whit the job starts to look dangerous. The plot coils and twists thought carefully staged reveals and double-crosses down to the grim climax and nicely ambiguous conclusion.
Robert Mitchum is superb, he has an easy charm and self-awareness about how he landed himself in the situation he finds himself in. He is devoid of self-pity, reacting with a sardonic competence and assurance to the ever increasing danger. Kirk Douglas, with his wide smile and held in rage is smooth and compelling. When the rage is finally unleashed, it is a quiet fury that has a frighteningly sincere intensity to it.
The dark heart of the film is Jane Greer, a sinuous and subtle performance, as a woman who is hell bent on surviving regardless of what she needs to do so. The men in the film are her playthings, none of them have her willingness to take any step necessary. In the last scenes of the film she emerges as truly herself, holding all the cards ands and ready to play them, the power of the moment makes her sparkle like a blood covered diamond. Men are sentimental fools who fall for her lure of romance, the price they pay for this is betrayal and death. The division between the wholesome world of small town America and the bleak urban underworld of Whit and Bailey is cunningly evoked to sharpen the shadows in the story. Unmissable.

The Darkness and The Deep. Aline Templeton. Hodder & Stoughton. (2006)

Very engaging and enjoyable crime story, a smart mix of a modern police procedural and village murder story. The loss of the Knockhaven lifeboat with the three crew is a huge blow for the small village, when it is found to have been deliberately engineered it exposes the fierce tensions and struggles that are swirling through the community. Detective Inspector Marjory Fleming is aware that drug smuggling has steadily replaced fishing as the most important local industry and has to establish if the wrecking was related to it. With tensions within the investigating team complicating matters, the mixed motives and agendas of the large, superbly drawn, cast are cleverly woven together and finally lead to a very satisfactory conclusion.
Aline Templeton makes very effective use of the context, the small community with is suffering from the terminal decline of the fishing industry and everyone knows some version of everyone else’s business. As with the best of village murder stories, the community has a multitude of motives and plausible suspects, the disentangling of which is one of the pleasures of the book. The cast are given room to breathe and grow into themselves, the reveals are cunning staged and arise very naturally from the action.
The counter pointing and overlapping of the tensions within the police investigation with the villagers is very neatly structured, Marjory Fleming's domestic troubles are plausible and expertly woven into the story. The final unravelling reveals something very nasty, it anchors the brutality of the wrecking of the lifeboat with grim strength and effectively bitter action. Great crime fiction, a pleasure.