The real St. Patrick's Day

It comes in May, and it celebrates the month the Irish drive boring crime fiction out of America.

May marks U.S. publication of the most recent novels by Adrian McKinty and Alan Glynn, each of whom has been mentioned with admiration and respect here at Detectives Beyond Borders. McKinty's I Hear the Sirens in the Street (Seventh Street Books) is the second in a trilogy that began with The Cold Cold Ground. Glynn's Graveland (Picador) follows on the scary dissection of paranoia and manipulation in his Bloodland.

Here's part of what I wrote about that book:

"Glynn is unprepared to accept the giddy assurances of boosters and innovators that online news heralds the path to a bright new world. His worries about the state of my profession are just a small part of a chilling, brilliant first chapter in which no one is sure of anything, so everyone is alert to everything, antennae twitching at the slightest whisper of disturbance."

And here's my take on I Hear the Sirens:

"Like its predecessor, Sirens is a serious portrait of one man's progress through troubled times (early-1980s Belfast and Carrickfergus, the author's home town). Like The Cold Cold Ground, it feels organic. Every joke, every grim encounter, or musing on the crappy Irish weather, or setback or advance in the police investigation contains the seeds of the whole. And it's a hell of a whole; these books are as smart and fun and harrowing as crime fiction gets."

So forget the green plastic leprechaun hats, will you, and read some good books instead.
© Peter Rozovsky 2013