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Crime fiction: Megan Abbott, Elmore Leonard, Luke Beirne, Paul Vidich, Karin Slaughter and K Anis Ahmed

Crime fiction: Megan Abbott, Elmore Leonard, Luke Beirne, Paul Vidich, Karin Slaughter and K Anis Ahmed

Irish Times15-06-2025
Megan Abbott's
El Dorado Drive
(Virago, £22) is a dark, satisfying delight. Abbott's
writing
has always been hypnotic, projecting a powerful sense of women's inner lives and desires through the prisms of noir and suspense.
El Dorado Drive – her first novel explicitly set in her hometown, the archetypal old-money
Detroit
suburb of Grosse Pointe, where 'Eisenhower was still president' – anchors that strength in a newly intimate sense of place. Abbott also has some new razor-edged fun here with American suburbia's satire-ready pathologies as they break through the patina of country club life.
The three Bishop sisters take centre stage: Pam's ex has stolen their kids' college funds; Debra's helping her husband through chemo; and Harper's coping with a break-up. Born into comfort, these three 'never thought about money until it was gone and then it was all any of them thought about'.
Heavily indebted and newly evicted, Harper's crashing with Pam, who tells her about the Wheel. Ostensibly a women's support group, each meeting of the Wheel concludes with a woman receiving a pile of cash from the newest members. Although one character unconvincingly insists the Wheel's 'not a pyramid … It's a triangle,' Harper recognises it means 'selling the women you knew. Even the ones you loved,' by capitalising on their economic vulnerability. Struggling with her own secrets and debts, Harper sets aside her unease to join the group.
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As the scheme plays out, a narcotic mix of regret, fear and love drives Abbott's characters forward, until someone winds up dead. The local cops, used to 'toilet paper vandalism and DUIs', are quickly out of their depth, leaving Harper to push for answers. As Harper tries to piece it all together, Abbott subtly moves her characters through slyly crafted surprises to a satisfying conclusion that betrays none of this book's intoxicating depth.
Another great Detroit-area writer, Elmore Leonard – one of America's most distinctive crime novelists – gets some well-designed reissues from the Penguin Modern Classics: Crime and Espionage list.
Like Abbott, Leonard has a gift for giving characters their own voices, his spare prose doing so as concisely as possible, even when – as in the lead reissue,
Rum Punch
(Penguin, £9.99) – describing extravagantly dramatic things like Nazi killing, gun running and money smuggling.
Elmore Leonard in Detroit, Michigan, in 1992. Photograph: Michael Brennan/Getty
Three of Rum Punch's main characters return from another welcome reissue, The Switch, where the kidnapping of a Detroit developer's wife very much fails to go as planned. Ordell, Louis and Melanie haven't grown noticeably luckier, smarter or kinder since then, but Rum Punch gets a different spark from airline steward Jackie, who's entangled in their schemes. Both more complex and easier to root for, Jackie is drawn as vividly as anything in Leonard's best work, and she makes Rum Punch sing.
Irish-Canadian journalist Luke Beirne's third novel, the quietly moving
Saints Rest
(Baraka Books, CAD$24.95), is set around St John, Newfoundland, an atmospherically drawn landscape that's key to the story.
Narrator Frank Cain is the junior member of a small PI agency, weighed down by a job that too often involves 'helping the rich stay rich and the poor stay hungry'. Warily, he takes on a new client, Malory Fleet, whose son Jason, a low-level dealer, was murdered exactly a year ago. Now, Jason's girlfriend Amanda has disappeared, and Malory, who sees her as a daughter, wants her back.
Immersing himself in the case, Frank soon loses his moorings, uncertain even whether Amanda fled or was taken. As he tries to find Amanda without losing himself along the way, Saints Rest unfolds quickly to a short, sharp shock of a conclusion.
Paul Vidich's
The Poet's Game
(No Exit, £18.99), an espionage thriller set in 2018 Washington and Moscow, is a worthy follow-up to his memorable Beirut Station. Vidich details political gamesmanship with an exactitude in the tradition of John le Carré, whose influence he ably honours.
A former CIA operative, Alex Matthews now runs Trinity Capital, a financial firm in Moscow, a city he knows well from his days as the CIA station chief. When the CIA director asks Alex back to help extricate an asset he recruited – code name Byron, the last remaining agent of his old network – Alex agrees.
His sense of duty lingers, though his commitment to the CIA had long been diminishing 'like a slow dusk' because of the agency's growing hypocrisy, leading to his marginalisation and early retirement. As Alex soon discovers, that institutional hypocrisy has endured: it looms large here, resting uneasily alongside his own love, guilt, and grief.
A tragic personal backstory reverberates throughout the novel, adding depth to Alex's character without overwhelming the central plot. The action moves ahead at an elegant pace and concludes on a pitch-perfect note.
Hugely popular bestseller Karin Slaughter starts a new series with
We Are All Guilty Here
(HarperCollins, £22). Although some of the seams show – this is a long book, full of plot twists and more than enough characters to populate several titles – Slaughter's clearly a real pro who's very, very skilled at what she does.
The propulsive first third captures the pressure between being a teen in a small town and the often naive helplessness of the adults struggling to love them. Desperate to be adults, Madison Dalrymple and Cheyenne Baker find themselves dangerously out of their depth. When they disappear, the community rushes to find them.
While trying to ensure that fear doesn't make neighbours 'tear each other apart', Deputy Emmy Clifton-Lang and her father Sheriff Gerald Clifton quickly find damning physical evidence, but their interrogations provide the leads that matter most.
Twelve years later, another girl disappears in disturbingly similar circumstances. This case throws its shadows over Emmy's own family, leaving bruises that will surely linger through the series. Embedded in its small Georgia town, We Are All Guilty Here stands out for often being as invested in these families as in the crimes they encounter.
Spinning a tale of hubris, Bangladesh memories, and exotic meats, K Anis Ahmed's
Carnivore
(HarperCollins, £16.99) is an energetic romp through a moneyed world that stops at nothing to feed its ego.
Bangladeshi emigrant Kash Mirza opened an exclusive Manhattan restaurant in the summer of 2008, when 'alpha-nerds with PhDs in stochastic mathematics or God-knows-what had no clue … markets would tank …everyone would be a millionaire.' Kash rode this wave as blindly as the rest, never anticipating the imminent crash. By the fall, though, those financial sharks 'turned into broken relics' and Kash faces being broken too, by Boris, a gangster from whom he borrowed a bit too much a bit too often. Trying to figure out how he landed in such a precarious situation, Kash summons the ghosts of his childhood and of his fellow ex-pats.
As Boris presses for repayment, cutting off Kash's pinky along the way, Carnivore follows Kash's increasingly inspired efforts to survive. He soon double-talks his way to a meeting with an international group of billionaire gastronomes, selling them an 'Evening of Danger' to appease their ennui.
As the novel moves to its culinary climax and Kash's rationalisations accumulate, Ahmed surrounds him with a vivid secondary cast, making this a charmingly gruesome depiction of his race for survival.
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Maureen Dowd: CBS and other media outlets caving to Trump is sickening. At least South Park will still hold people accountable
Maureen Dowd: CBS and other media outlets caving to Trump is sickening. At least South Park will still hold people accountable

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timea day ago

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Maureen Dowd: CBS and other media outlets caving to Trump is sickening. At least South Park will still hold people accountable

We haven't heard this much talk about the presidential anatomy since the other guy in the Jeffrey Epstein files was in the Oval. President Donald Trump , a master at minimising others, is now being literally minimised on South Park by the crass and fearless creators of the cartoon. I could have told Trump that it's best not to provoke brilliant satirists. I learned that lesson the hard way 20 years ago. When I wrote Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk, about the tangled father and son saga that led to the invasion of Iraq , I wanted Pat Oliphant, a lacerating political cartoonist, to do the book's cover. READ MORE I wheedled until that acerbic Aussie finally agreed. When the drawing came back, it was dazzling: a tiny, jangly-eyed George W Bush under a big cowboy hat, his hands braced at the guns on his holster. He was walking down the driveway of an overgrown haunted version of the White House with a gargoyle hanging from the trees. Oliphant had given the president the body of a bug. 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Four new films to see this week: The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Gazer, Dying/Sterben and The Bad Guys 2
Four new films to see this week: The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Gazer, Dying/Sterben and The Bad Guys 2

Irish Times

timea day ago

  • Irish Times

Four new films to see this week: The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Gazer, Dying/Sterben and The Bad Guys 2

The Fantastic Four: First Steps ★★★☆☆ Directed by Matt Shakman. Starring Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Joseph Quinn, Julia Garner, Natasha Lyonne, Paul Walter Hauser, Ralph Ineson. 12A cert, gen release, 114 min Marvel makes yet another effort to bring one its oldest hits to the big screen. Set on an alternative Earth, First Steps revels in a retro-futuristic version of the 1960s. True to the original, the Four super-powered chums are charged with stopping giant bore Galactus from annihilating the planet. We are free of any tangled links to previous films or TV series from the MCU. It can be enjoyed or loathed on its own uncomplicated terms. If the film does have a message it is that the greatest superpower of all is a mother's love. Full review DC Gazer ★★★★☆ Directed by Ryan J Sloan. Starring Ariella Mastroianni, Marcia Debonis, Renee Gagner, Jack Alberts, Tommy Kang. 15A cert, limited release, 134 min Frankie (Mastroianni) suffers from dyschronometria, a rare condition that distorts her perception of time. To cope, she records second-by-second audio prompts reminding her what she's doing and where she is. These serve as both narrative scaffolding and existential red flags, tethering us to her unravelling mind and blackouts. It's impossible not to think of Christopher Nolan's early work and the classic paranoia of DePalma's Blow Out and Coppola's The Conversation. But Gazer swerves from pastiche into Cronenbergian body horror as the already unreliable narrator becomes increasingly unmoored. Lo-fi and disarmingly intense. Full review TB READ MORE Dying/Sterben ★★★★☆ Directed by Matthias Glasner. Starring Lars Eidinger, Corinna Harfouch, Lilith Stangenberg, Ronald Zehrfeld, Robert Gwisdek, Anna Bederke, Hans-Uwe Bauer, Saskia Rosendahl. 16 cert, limited release, 182 min Saga concerning an elderly German couple and their unhelpful children. Dying is a film composed like its central musical motif: sprawling, discordant, haunted by mortality. Spanning three hours and five loosely tethered chapters, this dark family yarn plays like a collage of recent festival favourites; early, unvarnished scenes of elder care nod towards Vortex and Amour; a hectic middle section concerning a conductor recalls Todd Field's similarly themed Tár; a late narrative swerve into assisted suicide intersects with Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door. Somehow, the disparate pieces and maximalist clutter find a rhythm. Full review TB The Bad Guys 2 ★★★☆☆ Directed by Pierre Perifel. Voices of Sam Rockwell, Marc Maron, Craig Robinson, Anthony Ramos, Awkwafina, Danielle Brooks, Natasha Lyonne. G cert, gen release, 104 min Sequel to the so-so animation about a cadre of slick animal criminals. One remains puzzled as to what these films want to be. Not nearly enough is done with the atavistic natures of the heroes. Mr Wolf, voiced by Rockwell, may have big teeth (Grandma), but, the odd growl aside, he does little that George Clooney didn't do in the Oceans films. In contrast, far too much is done with the increasingly unwieldy plot. If you keep yakking about the McGuffin the audience will worry if they should genuinely care about it. That isn't happening here. Full review DC

Epstein saga has exposed cracks in Maga movement which could fatally undermine Donald Trump
Epstein saga has exposed cracks in Maga movement which could fatally undermine Donald Trump

Irish Times

time2 days ago

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Epstein saga has exposed cracks in Maga movement which could fatally undermine Donald Trump

The second Trump administration has featured many scandals: his shameless corruption, his pardoning of the January 6th insurrectionists, his pushing a Bill that strips millions from healthcare to give more money to those who need it the least, his backing for the Israeli genocide of Palestinians and Israel's other reckless wars in the Middle East. All these things seem more important than whether his justice department relents and releases its files on the Jeffrey Epstein case. Yet, this is the one scandal from which Trump can't seem to escape, and the one that might prove the most damaging for him politically. No one is more aware of this than Trump himself. It is a sign of his desperation to move on from the Epstein story that on Wednesday – at a bizarre press conference with the president of the Philippines looking on – he ranted about Barack Obama's supposed corruption. READ MORE He claimed that Obama was guilty of 'treason' and that he tried to 'lead a coup' with faked intelligence about Russian interference in the election. It was a transparent effort to change the story. The embattled Trump even admitted as much: 'It's time to go after people.' In the past, he has had a brilliant knack for deflecting negative attention from himself to others. During the 2016 campaign, it seemed like he was finished when the Access Hollywood tapes emerged which captured him bragging about groping women. But before the next presidential debate, he assembled a press conference of several women who claimed to be victims of sexual harassment by Bill Clinton . It worked then; it allowed enough voters to come to the cynical conclusion that all politicians are equally corrupt. The tactic is unlikely to work this time. Attacking Obama is something of a reflex for Trump, who rose to prominence promoting the 'birther' conspiracy theory that Obama was born outside the US. Trump's run for the presidency was, people close to him has said, partly a desire for vengeance against Obama after the then-president mercilessly mocked him at the fateful 2011 White House correspondents' dinner (Obama's quips included: 'No one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter–— like, did we fake the Moon landing'). But Obama is arguably the politician that the public would least expect to have anything to do with a sexual predator like Epstein. Bill Clinton was in fact friends with Epstein, but his presidency ended so long ago that attacking him just doesn't have much purchase any more. [ White House claims 'fake news' over reports Donald Trump named in Epstein files Opens in new window ] Donald Trump, Melania Knauss (later, Melania Trump), Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell pose together at the Mar-a-Lago club in 2000. Photograph: Davidoff Studios/ Getty Images This time, Trump hasn't been able to shift the narrative. That is partly because, as Ciarán O'Connor wrote this week , once the flames of conspiracy theories have been fanned, they are difficult to extinguish. But it is also because it goes to the same open secret that was at the centre of the Access Hollywood scandal: Trump's serial pattern of sexual abuse makes the notion that he has something to hide more plausible. To paraphrase congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who would have thought that electing a sexual offender would have complicated the release of the Epstein files? In 2023, a civil court ruled that Trump had sexually abused E Jean Carroll. By one count, at least 18 women have accused Trump of sexual assault or sexual harassment. The controversy over the release of the Epstein files has also resurfaced, leading to renewed attention on Trump's once close relationship with him. Epstein's brother has suggested that Trump was once Jeffrey Epstein's 'best friend'. The Wall Street Journal published a card that it claimed Trump sent Epstein on his 50th birthday with a lewd drawing of a woman and a reference to a 'wonderful secret'. Trump is suing the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion over the report, which he vehemently denies. It's possible that there is nothing in the Epstein files that reveals damaging information about Trump. But that is now almost beside the point. The political significance of the Epstein controversy is that it has hurt Trump's standing among his own base, which was already upset about his breaking America First principles by joining Israel's war against Iran. Though Trump has been unpopular with many Americans for most of the last decade, his political strength has been the unshakeable support of his base, which has allowed him to dominate the Republican Party. [ Bill Clinton reportedly sent Jeffrey Epstein note for birthday album Opens in new window ] This time, Trump hasn't been able to shift the narrative. Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/ Getty Images As he himself once boasted, 'I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters.' But it is symptomatic of his hubris that he promoted the conspiracy theory about Epstein, someone who was once a close associate. Under pressure from a disaffected Maga base, a significant number of Republican legislators broke with Trump for the first time in this second term. Rather than face a vote on whether to release the Epstein files that he was certain to lose, House Speaker Mike Johnson simply declared that they would break for summer early, even though that meant abandoning parts of the Republican agenda. But significantly, three Republicans on the ten-member House Committee on Oversight joined Democrats to subpoena the justice department for its Epstein files. Republicans Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Brian Jack of Georgia sided with Democrats. Democrats certainly don't consider the Epstein case to be the most significant issue facing the US – but they smell a rare political opportunity to exploit cracks in the Maga movement. They recognise that Trump is in a lose-lose situation. It seems unlikely he will release any information too damaging about himself. Yet, if he refuses to release files or releases them but there's nothing significant in them, many – and not only conspiracy theorists – will wonder if key information is being withheld. It's certainly possible that the Epstein controversy will blow over. Come September, when the US legislature reconvenes, we may all be talking about something else: a national or world crisis, quite possibly one of Trump's own making. And yet the cracks it has revealed in MAGA are potentially disastrous for Trump's power, dampening enthusiasm for Republican candidates at the next election, and undermining his tight control of the Republican Party.

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