A South Florida Sun-Sentinel Best Mystery Book of 2020
Praise for The Traveller and Other Stories
"Chilling . . . These stories have an uncanny power to convince. The best of Mr. Neville’s ghost tales can hold their own with those of the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen. But the ultimate prize-winner here, 'Coming in on Time,' a heartbreaking vignette of domestic tragedy seen through the eyes of its youngest victim, hasn’t a trace of the supernatural—only the horror of innocence encountering evil."
—Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal
“No matter the nature and circumstance of the plots, Neville shows his storytelling mastery in tales that inevitably climax with sentences loaded in desolation.”
—Jack Batten, The Toronto Star
"Noir, noir, noir—everybody wants to write noir fiction. But most self-anointed 'noir' narratives just don’t hack it. They’re dark and dreary, to be sure; but a true noir mystery must also have a black heart. This kind of spiritual despair comes naturally to Stuart Neville, whose Belfast crime novels bleed."
—The New York Times Book Review
"Splendid . . . This chilling assortment of Northern Irish noir is not to be missed."
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"Irish noir done to a turn, with just enough tearful sentiment to turn the screws tighter."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Neville, author of The Ghosts of Belfast, turns from thrilling mystery to chilling horror. Thirteen macabre tales feature killers and specters sure to haunt your dreams for days to come. Neville sets his stories amidst his native Irish shores, filling each yarn with a hint of the old country. This blend of genres conjures nightmarish realities to create a bone-chilling collection."
—The Lineup
"Hauntingly delicious . . . If you want to give friends an unexpected and highly memorable trick-or-treat, get a couple of extra copies of this collection. Make sure to ink your name into your own copy, so it won't walk away lightly. It will be, indeed, haunted."
—Kingdom Books
Praise for Stuart Neville
“A rare example of legitimate noir fiction.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Tightly wound, emotionally resonant . . . Displays an acute understanding of the true state of Northern Ireland, still under the thumb of decades of violence.”
—Los Angeles Times
"The current master of neo-noir detective fiction."
—The Boston Globe
“A brilliant thriller, unbearably tense, stomach-churningly frightening . . . A future classic.”
—The Observer
“A great, brawling ache of a novel . . . filled with both prickling suspense and fiercely wrought emotion.”
—Megan Abbott
“A flat-out terror trip.”
—James Ellroy
“An exceptional talent. Crime fiction doesn’t get much better.”
—Lee Child
★ 08/24/2020
Set mostly in the author’s native Northern Ireland, the 13 tales of horrific crimes and terrifying horrors in this splendid collection from Edgar finalist Neville (The Final Silence) are divided into two sections. Highlights from the first, “New Monsters,” include “Coming In on Time,” about the anguish of anticipating the unlikely return of a mother; “The Green Lady,” in which ghosts and a legendary woman lure a youngster fishing for sticklebacks into trouble; and “London Safe,” in which unthinkable consequences await a boy who grows up to find his father living another life in England. “Old Friends,” the second section, brings back characters from Neville’s novels, notably reprehensible Gerry Fegan of The Ghosts of Belfast, who appears in four stories. The captivating title novella resurrects a presumably dead Fegan as a contract killer hired to avenge the deaths of twin sons. In the tense “Faith,” a priest agrees to commit murder for a parishioner; in the disquieting “The Craftsman,” Albert and Celia Ryan of Ratlines settle past debts. Each entry turns on an unexpected ending. This chilling assortment of Northern Irish noir is not to be missed. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Assoc. (Oct.)
05/01/2020
The first mystery Banville has written under his own name, rather than as Benjamin Black, Snow stars a crusty Protestant detective investigating a murder in County Wexford, buried in endless Snow. In Carlyle's debut, The Girl in the Mirror, jealous Iris takes over the identity—and the handsome husband—of golden-girl twin sister Summer, who mysteriously disappears from a yacht in the middle of the Indian Ocean (100,000-copy first printing). In House of Correction, French's new stand-alone, back-in-town Tabitha is arrested for murder when a dead body is found in her shed, and given her pill-popping history of depression and faded recollections of the day, she starts wondering if she really is guilty (50,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing). In Jewell's Invisible Girl, virginal 30-year-old geography teacher Owen Pick is suspended from his job for sexual misconduct he denies, ends up on a shady online involuntary celibate forum, and eventually is a suspect in a teenager's disappearance (250,000-copy first printing). Molloy follows up her New York Times best-selling The Perfect Mother with Goodnight Beautiful, about newlyweds Sam Statler and Annie Potter, who have moved to his quiet upstate New York hometown as he pursues his career as a therapist, though, dangerously, his sessions are heard by neighbors through a ceiling vent (100,000-copy first printing). A Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner and finalist for multitudinous awards, Neville collects short crime, horror, and speculative fiction (some new to print) in The Traveller and Other Stories, a cogent example of Northern Irish noir. With Death and the Maiden, Norman wraps up mother Ariana Franklin's 1100s England-set series about Adelia Aguilar, Mistress of the Art of Death, with an original story about Adelia's daughter, Allie, investigating when several girls go missing from a village she is visiting (40,000-copy first printing). The protean Oates offers four masterly, never-before-published novellas, exemplified by the titular story in Cardiff by the Sea, whose protagonist rediscovers past tragedy when she inherits a house in Maine from someone she doesn't know. In Patterson/Serafin's Three Women Disappear, a mob accountant who is the nephew of the don of central Florida is fatally stabbed in his own kitchen, and which of three women—his wife, his maid, or his personal chef—might be responsible (500,000-copy first printing)? Rankin's A Song for Dark Times witnesses the returns of Inspector Rebus (50,000-copy first printing). In The Devil and the Dark Water, Turton's follow-up to the top LibraryReads pick, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, famed detective Samuel Pipps is sailing back to Amsterdam in chains when terrifying events assault the crew, Pipps's sidekick vanishes, and Pipps himself is asked to puzzle out what's happening.
2020-08-19
Life in contemporary Ireland is bracketed in these 12 tales—all but one of them reprints—by the experiences of young people who’ve scarcely tasted it and veterans who wish they hadn’t.
Neville’s foreword notes the pleasure he takes in writing stories that provide a break from the long-haul commitments of his novels. But that break is severely limited by both the stories’ thematic consistency and their recycling of characters and plotlines from the novels. The six stories in “New Monsters,” the first part of the collection, focus on innocents, mostly children, forced all too early in life to confront the ghosts of the past. A boy struggles to deal with the sudden absence of his mother in “Coming in on Time.” The title character of “Echo” is defined by his uncanny bond to the sister who died before he was born. “London Safe” tracks a grown man’s ill-fated reunion with the father who left him as a child. In the second part, “Old Friends,” the focus shifts to the ghosts themselves, dead-eyed souls like IRA hard case Gerry Fegan (last seen in The Ghosts of Belfast, 2009) and aging killer Albert Ryan (from Ratlines, 2013), who can’t forget the violent roles they’ve taken in the Troubles. Child and ghost collide most memorably in The Traveller, the concluding novella, in which Ellen McKenna, the daughter of pensioned cop Jack Lennon (from The Final Silence, 2014), is caught in the crossfire between her father and the nameless assassin, long presumed dead, who’s targeted him for a client who, like everyone else in Neville’s remorseless world, just can’t let the past go.
Irish noir done to a turn, with just enough tearful sentiment to turn the screws tighter.
