At the beginning of her cunning first novel, The Ruin (Penguin, purchased e-book), Dervla McTiernan writes that in Irish, “Ruin means something hidden, a mystery, or a secret, but the word also has a long history as a term of endearment.” She teases out all these meanings in a layered procedural set in in a 2013 Galway thick with mist and misdirection. Police detective Cormac Reilly, recently transferred from Dublin, feels sidelined working cold cases until Jack Blake dies in a fall from a bridge. Neither Jack’s estranged sister Maude, who has been living in Australia, nor his girlfriend, a surgical resident, think it’s suicide, but the police are reluctant to investigate further. Reilly remembers when he was a rookie in 1993 and removed 15-year-old Maude and 5-year-old Jack from a falling-down house in Kilmore after their mother died from a heroin overdose. When higher-ups turn their attention to Maude, who had motive and secrets, his suspicions are aroused. That the police unit itself is rife with rumors just adds to his unease. McTiernan follows Reilly, Maude and Aishling as they pursue mysteries old and new involving missing persons, drugs, rape and child abuse. It’s Ireland, so family loyalties and the church are also involved. Count me in for next year’s second in the series.
Two dark moments of Florida history — Ted Bundy and the Dozier School for Boys — shadow Lori Roy’s modern Gothic, The Disappearing (Dutton/Penguin, digital galley). The residents of little Waddell in rural North Florida refer to a serial killer who took his last victim, a teenage girl, from their town years ago as “Ted.” These days, out-town-reporters keep showing up as former students of the now-closed Fielding School report crimes of abuse and even murder. Former headmaster Neil Harding, sliding into dementia in his historic home, has nothing to say. His long-suffering wife shields him from outsiders; his grown daughter Lane, recently divorced, has reluctantly moved home with her two daughters. She remembers when she was a girl and used to leave food outside for boys running away from the reform school. She also remembers being shunned in high school after an incident involving a runaway. When a Florida State student disappears, Waddell wonders if a serial killer like Ted has returned. But when Lane’s older daughter Annabel vanishes, too, Lane fears a connection to her father and the school’s tainted history. Roy, who has won two Edgar Awards for her previous books, uses multiple perspectives to tell her story: Lane, her younger daughter Talley, fretful Erma, and an odd handyman, Daryl, who spies on Waddell’s young girls. It’s all suitably complicated and creepy, doubly so for Floridians familiar with the real-life crimes that inspired Roy.
A true crime case — that of Britain’s notorious Lord Lucan — acts as touchstone for Flynn Barry’s nimble A Double Life (Viking, digital galley). Narrator Claire is a London doctor whose real name is unknown to her colleagues and friends. She’s actually Lila Spenser, daughter of Colin Spenser, the Eton-educated lord who vanished when she was a child after being accused of attacking her mother and killing the nanny. Many believe that Spenser’s wealthy friends helped him escape, and he supposedly has been sighted in a number of countries over the last quarter century. Claire always has had trouble reconciling her childhood memories of her handsome father with her mother Faye’s account of her unhappy marriage. Mostly, she wants to find him, obsessively following Internet forums tracking the case and privately stalking his old friends. Barry mixes past and present to good effect, but the thrills really begin when Claire travels to Croatia on an apparent wild-goose chase. Maybe it is. Maybe not.
Belinda Bauer’s Snap (Atlantic Monthly, digital galley) has been longlisted for the prestigious Man Booker prize. A story in The Guardian noted that one judge thinks it transcends the crime genre, while another thinks it bends the form in new ways. Ok. I think it’s a clever puzzler that reminds me of a Ruth Rendell standalone or one of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels as it presents several disparate stories before connecting the plots. First up are 11-year-old Jack and his younger sisters Merry and Joy, whose pregnant mother goes off for help when their car breaks down. She never returns, the victim of an unsolved murder. Three years later, Jack’s still in charge, keeping the siblings together in their old house after their grieving father walks out. He’s become an accomplished cat burglar, stealing food and necessities, along with pricier goods he sells to his friendly neighborhood fence. In another part of town, pregnant Catherine While wakes up to an intruder in the house and later finds a knife by her bed with the menacing note: “I could have killed you.” Not wanting to make a “hoo-ha,” she doesn’t tell her husband or call the police. The latter are busy trying to catch the Goldilocks burglar, although Chief Inspector John Marvel longs for a good murder case. Bauer has some fun snapping the puzzle pieces in place, and Jack is a character to care about as he tries to find his mother’s killer.
Three more for your reading pleasure. Lawrence Osborne does an elegiac Raymond Chandler in Only to Sleep (Crown, digital galley), which finds Philip Marlowe mostly retired in Mexico in 1988. With silver sword cane in hand, the aging detective investigates an insurance scam involving a dead American businessman and his lovely young widow. Nicely written and achingly familiar, this sunset stroll should please Marlowe fans. William Shaw set his terrific Kings of London crime trilogy in the 1960s, and in Salt Lane (Little Brown, digital galley), Det. Sgt. Alexandra Cupidi links her modern-day murder case in Kent to the 1980s peace protests. Opioid addiction, the immigrant crisis and 
homelessness also figure in the nifty plot, and prickly outsider Cupidi, introduced in last year’s The Birdwatcher, makes for an interesting protagonist. In The Last Thing I Told You (Morrow, digital gallery), Emily Arsenault plays the unreliable narrator card with aplomb. A quiet New England town that was once shocked by a mass shooting at a retirement home is again rattled by the murder of a well-liked therapist. Police detective Henry Peacher methodically investigates, but another voice — that of former patient Natalie Raines — commands attention as she recounts her therapy sessions when she was a troubled high school student. Is it just coincidence that Natalie is back in town for the murder? Mmmm. I didn’t think so…
On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever 