Sneak Peek at Broken Harbour

Tana French's Broken Harbour has recently been published. You can read the first 20 pages here (a pdf hosted on the Euro Crime website and provided by the publishers).

Maxine has already reviewed it for Petrona.

Official synopsis: In Broken Harbour, a ghost estate outside Dublin - half-built, half-inhabited, half-abandoned - two children and their father are dead. The mother is on her way to intensive care. Scorcher Kennedy is given the case because he is the Murder squad's star detective. At first he and his rookie partner, Richie, think this is a simple one: Pat Spain was a casualty of the recession, so he killed his children, tried to kill his wife Jenny, and finished off with himself. But there are too many inexplicable details and the evidence is pointing in two directions at once. Scorcher's personal life is tugging for his attention. Seeing the case on the news has sent his sister Dina off the rails again, and she's resurrecting something that Scorcher thought he had tightly under control: what happened to their family, one summer at Broken Harbour, back when they were children. The neat compartments of his life are breaking down, and the sudden tangle of work and family is putting both at risk ...

New Reviews: Hughes, Kerrigan, McKinty

A new competition is now up and running (UK only I'm afraid). Win a copy of The Library of Shadows by Mikkel Birkegaard, donated by the translator Tiina Nunnally.

This week we're running an Irish theme with the reviews. The first batch has just been uploaded and a second set will follow later in the week:

Michelle Peckham reviews The Dying Breed by Declan Hughes;

Maxine Clarke reviews Dark Times in the City by Gene Kerrigan

and Laura Root reviews The Bloomsday Dead by Adrian McKinty.

Previous reviews can be found in the review archive and forthcoming titles can be found here.

Alan Glynn - Publishing Deal

This one's from BookBrunch:

To Angus Cargill at Faber, Alan Glynn's debut thriller WINTERLAND (November 2009), which has received advance praise from John Connolly and others. Cargill describes it as "an exceptional novel about widespread corruption, from government to street level, in modern day Dublin . . . Winterland seems set to mark Alan Glynn as the first literary chronicler of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland". Cargill bought the book with a pre-emptive bid through St Martin's Press.

Aiveen becomes Ava (McCarthy)

Just to confuse me, it seems as if new Irish writer Aiveen McCarthy will now be published as Ava McCarthy. Her first book is due in May 2009, called The Insider.

Blurb from amazon.co.uk:

A cutting-edge international thriller set in the world of hackers, techno-thieves and inside traders for fans of John Grisham. Henrietta 'Harry' Martinez lost her investment banker father, Sal, at a young age. He taught her everything he knew - about taking risks and calculating odds. But Sal made a bad gamble when he went into business with 'The Prophet', an anonymous trader who claims Harry owes him now her father's jailed for fraud. It's twelve million euros. Or her life. With no money and little time, Harry must track down Sal's crooked partners and escape the people on her trail -- journalists, police and hired killers. But Harry has her own skills, honed by her father, skills her enemies haven't anticipated. Now, from the London Stock Exchange to the casinos of the Bahamas, the chase is on. The stakes are high. And the bets are off!

Publishing Deal - new Irish crime writer

From Publishing News:

JULIA WISDOM AT HarperCollins pre-empted UK/Commonwealth rights to two thrillers by Irish debutante Aiveen McCarthy. The Insider, scheduled for next spring, introduces Dublin-based heroine Henrietta 'Harry' Martinez, a whiz computer hacker turned security pro who becomes entangled in her father's financial scams and finds herself the target of a psychopathic murderer. Wisdom, who bought from Laura Longrigg at MBA, describes it as “a breath-taking page-turner, painted on an international canvas”.