Irish Thrillers

Lucy Hall arrives in the Seychelles determined to leave her worries behind. The tropical paradise looks sun-soaked and picture-perfect - but as Lucy soon discovers, appearances can be very deceptive. A deadly secret lurks in the island's history, buried deep but not forgotten. And it is about to come to light. As black clouds begin to gather over what promised to be a relaxing family break, Lucy realises that her father stands in the eye of the coming storm.

The mystery of the modern thriller pervades the twists in the plot of this remarkable Victorian novel about the disappearance of a young man and the lady who is haunted by more than one terrible secret.

En Angleterre, de nos jours. Meg et Grace Nichols, ce sont peu les pierres angulaires qui cimentent le petit village de pêcheurs d'Ashford, dans les Cornouailles. Tout le monde aime et aide cette mère célibataire qui a tout sacrifié pour prendre soin, seule, de sa fille Grace, une ado lourdement handicapée et totalement dépendante. Jusqu'à ce matin d'été : Meg est découverte assassinée dans son lit ; de Grace, il ne reste que le fauteuil roulant, abandonné dans le jardin.

New York in 1803 is rife with tension as the city expands, and whoever knows where the city will build can control it. And violence builds as a mysterious provocateur pits the city’s black and Irish gangs against each other. When a young black girl is found stabbed to death, both Justy Flanagan, now a city marshal, and Kerry O’Toole, now a school teacher, decide separately to go after the killer. They each find their way to a shadowy community on the fringes of the growing city, where they uncover a craven political conspiracy....

Sept jours d'idylle... Il aura suffi d'une semaine pour que s'inverse le cours de l'existence monotone de Sarah. Depuis qu'elle a rencontré Eddie sur une petite route de campagne anglaise, la jeune femme est certaine qu'un bonheur sans nuages les attend. Sa vie débute enfin. Le jour où il lui annonce qu'il doit s'absenter pour un voyage prévu de longue date, Sarah n'a aucune inquiétude. Mais le temps passe et Eddie ne revient pas. La laisse sans nouvelles. Ne répond plus à ses messages. Rien.

Susan has everything she ever wanted. A loving husband, an angelic daughter and the cottage of her dreams in County Cork. Her picture-perfect life seems too good to be true. And it is. At a housewarming party with their new neighbours, her daughter Amelia goes missing. As friends become suspects, Susan’s life spirals out of control. And when Amelia’s yellow cardigan is dredged from the lake, every parent’s worst nightmare suddenly seems horribly real. In the aftermath of Amelia’s disappearance Susan and her husband Paul are not themselves. Someone is hiding something.

As 1995 dawns in the North of Ireland, Belfast is a city of army patrols, bombed-out buildings, and “peace walls” segregating one community from the other. But the IRA has called a ceasefire. So, it’s as good a time as any for Monty Collins and Father Brennan Burke to visit the city: Monty to do a short gig in a law firm, and Brennan to reconnect with family. And it’s a good time for Brennan’s cousin Ronan to lay down arms and campaign for election in a future peacetime government. But then a man goes off a bridge on a dark, lonely road; a rogue IRA enforcer is shot; and a series of car bombs remains an unsolved crime.

As a widowed mother of three, new love seems impossible for Freya - until she meets Duncan, and suddenly she feels alive again. While Freya’s older children are less than welcoming, six-year-old Sophie helps Duncan find his place in the family - but even Sophie harbours fears that threaten to overshadow any chance of a new start. The past is hard to leave behind when pictures of Freya’s idolised late husband hang in every room, and the more Duncan tries to find the source of Sophie’s anxiety, the more he is convinced that Reuben was not the perfect husband and father Freya remembers.

Devastated by a broken engagement, Stella Jackson leaves her old life behind for a new start in rural Scotland. But when she arrives in the remote coastal village of Arisaig, nothing is what she expected. At the edge of Arisaig sits Munro House; grand, imposing and said to be cursed by a string of tragic deaths. No less intriguing is its eccentric and handsome young owner, Jamie Munro, who hires Stella as his assistant while he pursues a seemingly impossible aim.

The Beetle tells the tale of an evil, ancient Egyptian spirit seeking revenge on an up-and-coming British politician, Paul Lessingham. The shape-shifting creature that pursues Lessingham is possessed of hypnotic powers and takes different forms, both male and female, as well as morphing into a beetle - a figure that induces terror in its victims.

It was my father’s arrest that brought me here, although you could certainly say that I took the scenic route. Here is rehab, where Ben - the only son of a rich South Dublin banker - is piecing together the shattered remains of his life. Abruptly cut off, at the age of 27, from a life of heedless privilege, Ben flounders through a world of drugs and dead-end jobs, his self-esteem at rock bottom. Even his once-adoring girlfriend, Clio, is at the end of her tether. Then Ben runs into an old school friend who wants to cut him in on a scam.

In the idyllic Irish village of Ballywick, Shayla Murphy is living her dream. With her charming fiancé Seamus by her side, she's just a week away from the grand opening of the Eyerloch Castle Hotel—a high-class haven she's been tasked with managing. Just when the finishing touches are being made, unexpected visitors in the form of the richest family in Australia descend upon the not-yet-open hotel, seeking luxurious accommodations. When a member of the visiting family turns up dead, the grand opening is the least of Shayla's worries.

Paddy Buckley is a grieving widower who has worked for years for Gallagher's, a long-established - some say the best - funeral home in Dublin. One night, while driving home after an unexpected encounter with a client, Paddy hits a pedestrian crossing the street. He pulls over and gets out of his car, intending to do the right thing. As he bends over to help the man, he recognizes him. It's Donal Cullen, brother of one of the most notorious mobsters in Dublin. And he's dead.

Now, Bram Stoker's Dracula - the pinnacle of Gothic horror for generations - rises again. When young English lawyer Jonathan Harker arrives in Transylvania on the eve of Saint George's Day, he cannot shake a strange feeling of uneasiness. The air grows colder as he arrives at his destination: the castle of Count Dracula. Jonathan has been summoned by the count for business, and while he finds his new host obliging and polite, he can't help but notice the man's pallid skin, odd lack of appetite, and long daytime absences.

It is only a passing comment in the post office in a remote part of Western Ireland that alerts police to the disappearance of Davin Faherty. But foul play is established when his unceremoniously wrapped corpse turns up in a bog. His brother falls under suspicion, but why kill over a near-useless piece of grazing land? DI Maureen Lyons leads the investigation but relies on trusty Mulholland, the old-school local policeman stationed in Clifden, for the legwork. She has other problems: an illegal cannabis farm and a prospector from a US minerals company who won't take no for an answer.

Eddie Sutherland is dead. Normally, Detective Wes O'Brien wouldn't care about another dead drug dealer, but he may just be the man who killed him. Thrown off the force and under investigation, Wes is called upon privately to look into a cheating spouse case.

“When I rolled out of bed at the butt crack of dawn, I had no idea my day would start with a missing sheep and end with a dead dude in a crotchless mankini". Armed with her newly issued private investigator’s license, Maggie Doyle is on the case...of a sheep that went missing 22 years ago. When she trips over a dead body on the first day of the investigation, Maggie realizes there’s more to this cold case than a fight over lamb chops.

When Charlotte McKay wakes up in a hospital bed with no memory of how she got there, all she wants is to go back to the perfect London flat she shares with her husband, and the impressive career she’s worked so hard to build. But something’s not right. Her husband David is at her bedside - but so is a three-year-old girl, and she’s calling Charlotte "Mummy"....

In this gothic, virtuoso debut collection, Mike McCormack dispenses nightmares both stylish and macabre. "A Is for Ax" offers alphabetized look at the killing of a parent, while the title story tracks a chilling sibling rivalry. Other works here offer multiple-quiz on the road to Calvary, a door-to-door saleswoman trafficking in strange and menacing feats, and a self-mutilating artist pushing himself to the limit. These sly and dangerous stories show us a young writer who was already a master of wicked formal play, and whose sly takes on life and death remain profoundly unsettling.

After surviving an attempt on his life in Paris, Sherlock Holmes returns to London, where the great detective is almost immediately enlisted by his brother to secure the safety of the delegates at a top-secret peace conference. With Europe a veritable powder keg in the years before World War I, Holmes understands any misstep on his part could prove fatal and possibly plunge the continent into war. However, after pledging to do his utmost for "King and Country", Holmes suddenly finds himself overwhelmed by an onslaught of cases.