Michael Connelly indulges in fresh freedom, Brian McGilloway serves an suffocating claustrophobic matter – the Irish time

A beheaded Buffalo, a stolen jade statue of a black marlin and a touch of corruption that spoiled around a huge ferris wheel – the opening chapter from Nightshade (Orion, £ 22), which contains its fair proportion of “freaks and f ** cups”, could easily be that of a Carl Hiaasen satire.

However, we are far from Hiaasen's stamping soil of Florida: This standalone by Michael Connelly takes place on Catalina Island, which, although it is almost 50 km off the California coast, is subject to the jurisdiction of the Sheriff department of the LA district.

DS Stilwell was banished to the island under a cloud and has long since recognized that in Catalina he would be discovered as the body of a young woman in the harbor, he burdens with anchor chains and a murder examination is opened, Stilwell has no choice but to work with his old enemies on the mainland.

But while Nightshad is an independent, it is fair to say that it maintains the kind of values ​​that would recognize and respect the Connelly's series (Bosch, Haller et al): on an island with striking wealth and functional poverty, the styles to beat the marginalized “people with money and power”, to “people with money and power” “Calculate the released on the upbringing of the annoying shadow”.

In Connelly's deceptively understood style, the story is very detailed when it comes to island life, but its essentials in the back-rich prose of the classic crime thriller are delivering. Stilwell itself feels like a relapse and may even serve as a tribute to classic California detectives – privately or in other ways – to the Continental op. The permanent sense is that of Connelly, who is pleased in the freedom of researching a brand new environment. It is to be hoped that the nightshade will not remain independent for a long time.

[ Michael Connelly: ‘All four of my grandparents were of straight Irish descent. I feel it in my bones’Opens in new window ]

Hawa Barrie comes from Sierra Leone, moved to Edinburgh to continue her studies as Foday Mannahs The search for Othella Savage (Quercus, £ 16.99) begins. Hawa is already traumatized by the kidnapping and murder of some of her compatriots and is at the center of an investigation for missing people when her friend Othella disappears.

We learn that Othella worked as a “ambassador” for the Lion Mountain Church of Pastor Ranka, one of many young women encouraged by the church to entertain wealthy white men, the better to persuade them to donate to the church's non -profit foundation. Could one of the women of women to be a serial killer? Or is Pastor Ranka's mission a cover for something really scary? The truth, Hawa believes, can be found in Sierra Leone, where “a rich man with a political and religious influence is able to literally do everything”.

The backdrop is fascinating and Mannah's transplantation of West African culture and beliefs in the Scottish lowlands is excellently carried out, but the action is known to the point to be worn out.

Eleni Kyracou's A nice way to die (Chief of Zeus, £ 16,99) opened in the Ealing Studios in 1954, where Hollywood star Stella Hope is in Purdah. Until recently, half of “Hollywood's golden couple”, Stella shortly before the divorce has been forgotten when she receives a blackmail letter from California.

In the meantime, the aspiring actress Ginny Watkins London has just left Hollywood, where she catches the always growing eye by Max Whitman, alias Stella's husband. Ginny quickly underwent her illusions about Hollywood's glamor and at the mercy of the predatory “wolves”, which equipped the boulevards and film sets, every perverse mood to drug-coated murder through its studio fixers.

The parallel diagrams are neatly connected, but where Kyracacou is really in her portrait of an actress as a young Ingénue. Ginny suffers from the countless outrage of the emerging actress, which includes voluntary hunger, psychological torture, operations and criminal contracts.

In the village of Drumsuin in western Ireland, Sinéad Nolan's debut The counting game (Harper North, £ 16.99) started in 1995 with the 13-year-old Saoirse during a hiding game in the forest near her family home. The only witness of her disappearance is her nine -year -old brother Jack, but when the English psychotherapist Dr. Freya Cummings arrives in Drumsuin to help the Garda by interviewing Jack, the only indication that the traumatized child can offer that this mock the forests of a “creature” that mock the forests.

What follows offers a fascinating view of the concept of collective trauma, since Nolan Folk Horror and the recent Irish story combines (the place of a Magdal wash is located in the drumsuin forest).

Unfortunately, Dr. Cummings no plausible amateur -Sleuth. Cummings is dissatisfied with the pace of investigations and disregarded by its complete lack of local knowledge. He ignores Garda's local detective: “If Walter would not research me or give him my idea, I would have to investigate alone.”

Exactly why Cummings believes that they are better qualified for the research, or why their “assumptions” are more valuable than the findings of the local Gardaí, is never convincingly addressed.

Brian McGilloways The one you least suspect (Constable, £ 15.99) begins with a single mother Katie Hamill, who deserves a lean a living as a bar cleaner in Derry. A hard life that becomes more difficult when Katie is targeted by the special branch and put pressure on her eyes and ears to be made open to useful information that could conduct their employer, bar owner Mark O'reilly, and his brother Terry, both of whom are in Derry's illegal drug trafficking.

When Katie refuses to get involved (“Derry's history was littered with the corpses of those who were accused of informing the police or a special branch against paramilitaries.”) She is caught in a truck, while her self -proclaimed handler pull and threaten to have taken away from her from her. Soon Katie lives a Kafkaesque alb dream, turns desperately and turns when she tries to play both sides against each other and try to stay alive long enough to find a way out.

McGilloways 13th novel is an suffocating claustrophobic affair, a quotidian horror about how easy a person can become in a deadly game, in which two shades of gray are correct and false:

Perhaps the most terrible aspect of history is that Katie is not a conventional faulty tragic heroine: there is nothing unique in her circumstances, she is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and is powerless when the machinery begins to grind. The best crime fiction talks about the everyday world that we want, we could ignore. The one that they least suspect speaks to the calm authority of the truth.

Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is the lamb laminers (no alibis press).