You don't need a serial killer to write a compelling novel. You don't need a tortured, alcoholic cop or car chases or glamorous villains or the shoot out at the OK Corral. Brian McGilloway's Irish borderlands series is quietly proving that a strong plot, characterisation and a sense of place can provide all the drama and intrigue a writer needs without resorting to the genre's more spectacular devices.
It is a trick he pulled off briliantly in two previous novels - Borderlands and Gallows Lane (I have not read the third, Bleed a River Deep). The Rising, the fourth novel featuring Garda detective Benedict Devlin, is another quietly powerful book.
Devlin is called out in the middle of the night to a fire in a barn at a farm. He bravely enters the building to pull an elderly man from the fire, but cannot reach another man before the fire consumes him.
The dead man is found to be a local drug dealer, and while few others mourn his passing, Devlin investigates what proves to be a murder with the same dedication he would give to any other victim. His investigation leads him into the cut-throat world of the cross-border drugs trade.
The murder takes place as a local anti-drugs activist group, known as The Rising, begin to take direct action against the trade, arguing that the Garda are not doing enough to stop the trade and protect communities from its grip. As The Rising appears to include a number of questionable characters - one pof whom is an old adversary - Devlin starts to look to the group for answers.
The case also takes on a personal angle when the son of former colleague, Caroline Williams, with whom Devlin was close, is found dead apparently the victim of a drug-induced suicide.
Devlin, as is his way, goes about the task of piecing together the story with quiet determination and no unnecessary drama. He manages to avoid conflict with his superiors, but is in no way a yes man. He has difficulties balancing family life with his work, but in the same way that most of us do rather than the self-destructive fashion common among fictional cops. He is decent, effective and above all human. It makes him a peculiar companion in crime literature.
Devlin's no frills approach is reflected in McGilloway's deceptively simple writing. I say deceptively simple, because there is a spare, no-words-wasted approach that rolls so effortlessly off the page you could think it got on to the page as easily. But there's great skill in this writing. It would probably be a lot easier to have Devlin go off on a bender and shoot and swear his way through the case.
But the drug problem, office politics and family tensions are complex issues that require thoughful treatment - not cliches and melodrama - and that is what they get here.
Quietly, Brian McGilloway is putting together an excellent series of crime novels that are the equal of anything out there in Britain and Ireland at present. This is an excellent addition, a tense and emotional story that boils gently towards a climax that matches the sophistication of the plot and McGilloway's unusually considered approach.
