THE GUILTY HEART

Julie Parsons

Macmillan hb, £12.99

Reviewed by Russell James

It's great to find a writer who can take a well-worn theme and run with it in an entirely different direction. (And let's face it: how many different routes are there really in crime fiction?) A child disappears, and ten years later his guilt-torn father returns to Dublin in an surely impossible attempt to discover what happened. The loss of the child has cast his marriage on the rocks, and if his career - ironically, as a children's illustrator - remains sound, his personal life by now is shot. Back in Dublin, uneasily lodged in the old family home, Nick Cassidy visits those friends and neighbours still there - and rapidly finds himself, not so much on the trail of the killer, as the prime suspect. Why else would he have returned? The police, or the Irish Guarda, are well characterised in this book, as are the differences in the way the Irish police handle cases like this. It's a well told story, if a little soggy in the middle, and just as you sit back in the comfortable belief that you can see where it must be going, Parsons brings in the twists. And keeps them coming.