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Reading Rescue, January 2009:
Novels Set in Ireland
 By Anne Allen and Mary Anne Fulmer
It's January already, a new year and another chance for
the Reading Rescuers (no boring books here!) to steer you toward
interesting, exciting, or amusing books available at the library. The
library has recently added a variety of novels set in either Ireland or
Scotland that are sure to appeal.
Tana French's first novel, In the Woods, begins
with three children running into the woods on a summer day. Late that
night, one boy is found, bloody and unresponsive, but alive. The other
two have simply vanished. Twenty years later, Adam Ryan (dubbed by
newspapers at the time "the boy who came back") has cut all ties with
his past. Now using his middle name of Rob, he is working as a homicide
detective in Dublin. Then a report comes in that a crew of archeologists
working on a dig has found a body in the woods. Keeping his connection
with the previous case a secret, Rob and his partner, Cassie Maddox, are
assigned to the murder. French knows how to tell an engrossing story,
and this one won't let you go until the finish. If the end is a bit of a
letdown, it wasn't enough to stop us from grabbing her second effort,
The Likeness, and devouring it as well. Cassie Maddox, now working
in the domestic violence division, receives a disturbing call. A woman
has been found dead who bears a strong resemblance to Cassie and even
more strangely has been identified as Lexie Madison, an identity Cassie
used several years earlier in an undercover operation. Her old boss has
a crazy plan: pretend the dead woman was only in a coma and send Cassie
to impersonate Lexie in hopes of solving the case. Tana French combines
dynamite story telling ability with a compelling story, a great setting,
and appealing characters in these psychological thrillers.
Inspector John Rebus has been the central character of
Ian Rankin's Edinburgh police procedurals for many years, and in Exit
Music the long-time detective inspector is putting in his last few
days before retirement. The murder of an expatriate dissident Russian
poet doesn't seem like the case he would choose for his last one, but
when Rebus's old nemesis crime lord Morris "Big Ger" Cafferty enters the
picture the action really takes off. The subsequent murder of a
videographer threatens to be related to a crime Rebus's bosses want to
treat as a mugging and draws members of the Scottish Parliament, the
Edinburgh banking community, and Russian businessmen into the
investigation. Rebus himself is in fine form, knowing he has only a few
days left on the job. If you haven't read Rankin's earlier books, a good
one to start with is Dead Souls as Rebus deals with both a
recently released pedophile and a serial killer who has been released
from an American prison on a technicality and deported back to Scotland.
Rankin never disappoints as he depicts a gritty Edinburgh, populated
with gangsters, drug dealers, and low level crooks, with corruption at
the highest levels.
Isabel Dalhousie of Alexander McCall Smith's The
Sunday Philosophy Club seems to live in a different Edinburgh. In
the first novel, Isabel, the well-off part-time editor of a philosophy
journal, attends a music concert and witnesses a young man plummeting to
his death from the upper part of the hall. When the police seem inclined
to write the incident off as either an unfortunate accident or suicide,
philosopher Isabel decides it is her moral duty to investigate. As she
satisfies her curiosity, the book introduces the reader to Isabel's
circle of friends (her difficult niece Cat who owns a deli, Cat's
ex-boyfriend the handsome musician Jamie, Isabel's housekeeper Grace)
and her well-mannered and cultured life (attending art gallery openings,
filling in at the deli, and working on the journal of philosophy). Long
on charm, these books (presently a series of five) aren't exciting, but
reading them is sort of like eating peanuts: you pick up one and enjoy
it, then a second to find out what happens next, and then another until
you've read them all.
In Garnethill by Denise Mina, Maureen O’Donnell
has been recently released from a Glasgow psychiatric hospital treating
sex abuse victims and is trying to put her life back together. Bored
with work as a theater ticket seller and depressed that her doctor
boyfriend has gone back to his wife, she goes out for a drunken evening
with a friend. When she returns home, the ex-boyfriend's dead body is in
her living room, tied to a chair, with his throat cut. Not only do the
police think Maureen is guilty, so do the doctor's politically prominent
mother and her own alcoholic drama queen mother. As she struggles to
prove her innocence, Maureen's path leads her to more victims of sexual
abuse, drug dealers (including her brother), unsavory health clinic
workers, and more murders. Author Mina keeps the action moving, Glasgow
is an appropriately dead end and grimy setting, and Maureen is a
believable and tough as nails character trying to sort out the insanity
that suddenly surrounds her.
The adult winter reading program will begin on January
19. Stop in soon to register and pick up a reading log. Miss Pat’s Story
Time will resume on January 26. The library continues to open at 9:00,
but on exceptionally snowy or icy mornings it is a good idea to phone
first. In bad weather, we encourage our patrons to renew their borrowed
materials and place holds either by phone at 724-744-4414 or on the
library website (www.pennlib.org).
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