Book reviews: recently published books of Irish and Irish-American interest

Ancient legends of places like Port na Rón (Seal Harbor) give depth to heroine Nora Gavin’s desperate journey to discover the reality about her sister Tríona’s murder in time to save her niece Elizabeth, for whom the five years since her mother’s death have changed her from a blissfully unaware child to a young woman painfully entering the world of adult truths. Nora is caught in a race against time. The few allies who believe her theories about Tríona’s murder include a sole police officer burdened with a troubled personal life and his own feelings for Nora. While facing dangers that become more complex and terrifying with each chapter, Nora struggles to come to terms with her own emotions in the wake of tragedy, eventually learning that “the universe had turned out to be a much stranger and more fluid place than she had ever imagined.”

– Kara Rota

($26.00 / 336 pages / Scribner)

Bill Loehfelm’s first novel Fresh Kills was hailed by the Associated Press as the “finest crime fiction debut since Dennis Lehane burst onto the scene.” High praise indeed for Loehfelm, who, like Lehane, explores the lives of “working class Irish Catholics” (as Loehfelm himself put it in an interview with USA Today).

Loehfelm has now published his second novel, Bloodroot, a thought-provoking psychological thriller that revolves around brothers Kevin and Danny Curran. The Staten Island siblings are updated versions of Cain and Abel: good and bad brothers who can’t untangle themselves from each other. Kevin is a college professor while Danny is a drug addict with a terrible childhood secret. Loehfelm masterfully portrays the complicated Curran family past, as he vividly brings to life a slice of New York rarely seen, unless tinged with disdain or sentimentality. In the end, however, Bloodroot is a triumph because of the characters and the collision courses – psychological, familial, criminal – Loehfelm sets up. The Brooklyn-born, Staten Island-reared Loehfelm now lives in New Orleans. But his literary heart remains in hidden corners of New York, which, in two books now, he has shown he owns the way Lehane owns Boston, and Ken Bruen owns Galway.

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Nster.com