Published by Headline in
hardback, ISBN: 978 0 7553 8637 6
An average of sixteen people per
day go missing in Ireland,
say police statistics, and teenage girls make up a large proportion of them.
But two missing girls in one small border town in the same month is unusual, to
say the least.
Forensic psychologist Paula Maguire
returns to the home town she abandoned twelve years earlier to join a
specialist squad set up to investigate cold missing persons cases, only to find
herself thrown in at the sharp end now that the two girls have become the
priority.
A fertile enough premise in itself,
you’d think – but there is much, much more to this richly layered novel. The
town is populated by a plentiful mix of personalities, some with a well
developed back story, others with only a sketch, and even when the background
is no more than an outline, there’s a strong sense of three dimensions, and
life continuing off the page.
Paula Maguire herself is one of the
most complex characters I’ve recently encountered in a crime novel. She isn’t
always likeable, but Claire McGowan is a skilled enough writer to make her
protagonist intriguing even when you want to slap her.
Like her native Northern Ireland,
Maguire is damaged by a past which has left too many scars and rifts for
healing to come easily. She’s intuitive and determined, and cares deeply about
the work she has taken on; she also impetuous and makes some poor choices, and
has a problem with authority.
Northern Ireland itself is almost
another character in the tangled plot. Several times I shook my head in despair
as the police failed to follow up yet another obvious lead – but it was plain
that the author was all too familiar with her home country’s destructive
history from which recovery will be a long, slow process, and the leftover
issues it faces.
It’s tempting to place The Lost
in that category of fiction often described as a novel first and a crime novel
only incidentally, but that would be to do an injustice to a plot which kept
this hardened reader guessing right up to the final kick in the ending. There’s
no reason at all why a cracking good crime novel shouldn’t have all the
qualities which should define good literary fiction: quality writing, vividly
drawn characters with a life outside the confines of the plot, a powerful sense
of the environment in which it’s set, and above all, something important to
say. It has all this, and is a great page-turner as well.
-------
Reviewer:
Lynne Patrick
Claire
McGowan grew up in a small village in Northern
Ireland. After a degree in English and French from Oxford University she moved
to London and worked in the charity sector. The Lost
is her second novel.
Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen,
and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but
never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher
for a few years, and is proud to have launched several careers which are now
burgeoning.
She
lives on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house groaning with books, about
half of them crime fiction.
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