Welcome to our new Dublin City Libraries book blog, Shelf Life! We will bring you the best of our library catalogue and help you find your next great read.
You only have to look at mainstream TV listings or Netflix’s new-in section to see that the nation’s obsession with true crime and crime drama isn’t going anywhere. So, in all, the fascination for crime thrillers stems from the thrill of the vicarious entertainment and the intellectual rush of participating in a mystery that you almost feel you have helped unravel, apart from a deeper understanding of what makes the human mind function, soar, click or break.Mad by Chloé Esposito. Alvie Knightly is a trainwreck: aimless, haphazard, and pretty much constantly drunk. Alvie's existence is made even more futile in contrast to that of her identical and perfect twin sister, Beth. Alvie lives on social media, eats kebabs for breakfast, and gets stopped at security when the sex toy in her carry-on starts buzzing. Beth is married to a hot, rich Italian, dotes on her beautiful baby boy, and has always been their mother's favorite. The twins' days of having anything in common besides their looks are long gone.When Beth sends Alvie a first-class plane ticket to visit her in Italy, Alvie is reluctant to go. But when she gets fired from the job she hates and her flatmates kick her out on the streets, a luxury villa in glitzy Taormina suddenly sounds more appealing. Beth asks Alvie to swap places with her for just a few hours so she can go out unnoticed by her husband. Alvie jumps at the chance to take over her sister's life--if only temporarily. But when the night ends with Beth dead at the bottom of the pool, Alvie realizes that this is her chance to change her life.Alvie quickly discovers that living Beth's life is harder than she thought. What was her sister hiding from her husband? And why did Beth invite her to Italy at all? As Alvie digs deeper, she uncovers Mafia connections, secret lovers, attractive hitmen, and one extremely corrupt priest, all of whom are starting to catch on to her charade. Now Alvie has to rely on all the skills that made her unemployable--a turned-to-11 sex drive, a love of guns, lying to her mother--if she wants to keep her million-dollar prize. She is uncensored, unhinged, and unforgettable.Island of the Mad by Laurie R. King. Russell herself is feeling less than balanced, and the last thing she wants is to deal with the mad. However, she agrees to look into it, when her friend escapes. The pursuit leads her across Europe to Venice and finally to the Poveglia Island, a lunatic asylum build on the bones of centuries of plague victims. Russell takes a deep breath, and follows, only to find that the lunatics may be in charge of the asylum, and nothing is quite as it seems.Murder Gone Mad by Philip MacDonald. The first Golden Age detective novel to feature a serial killer with no rational motive - and surely impossible for Scotland Yard to solve? A long knife with a brilliant but perverted brain directing it is terrorising Holmdale – innocent people are being done to death under the very eyes of the law. After every murder a business-like letter arrives announcing that another ‘removal has been carried out’, and Inspector Pyke of Scotland Yard has nothing to go on but the evidence of the bodies themselves and the butcher’s own bravado. With clear thinking impossible in the face of such a breathless killing spree, the police make painfully slow progress: but how do you find a maniac who has no rational motive? Philip MacDonald had shown himself in The Noose and The Rasp to be a master of the detective novel. In Murder Gone Mad he raised the stakes with the first Golden Age crime novel to feature a motiveless serial killer prompted only by blood lust – inspired by the real-life case in 1929 of the Düsseldorf Monster – and this time without the familiar Anthony Gethryn on hand to reassure the reader.Galway Girl by Ken Bruen. The latest Jack Taylor novel from the Godfather of Irish noir. Jack Taylor has never quite been able get his life together, but now he has truly hit rock bottom. Still reeling from a violent family tragedy, Taylor is busy drowning his grief in Jameson and uppers, as usual, when a high-profile officer in the local Garda is murdered. After another Guard is found dead, and then another, Taylor's old colleagues from the force implore him to take on the case. The plot is one big game, and all of the pieces seem to be moving at the behest of one dangerously mysterious team: a trio of young killers with very different styles, but who are united in their common desire to take down Jack Taylor. Their ring leader is Jericho, a psychotic girl from Galway who is grieving the loss of her lover, and who will force Jack to confront some personal trauma from his past.My Girl by Jack Jordan. Paige Dawson: the mother of a murdered child and wife to a dead man. She has nothing left to live for ... until she finds her husband's handgun hidden in their house. Why did Ryan need a gun? What did he know about their daughter's death. Desperate for the truth, Paige begins to unearth her husband's secrets. But she has no idea who she is up against, or that her life isn't hers to gamble – she belongs to me.Access eBooks/eAudiobooks on your phone, tablet or reader. Once you have installed the app, search for Dublin in the ‘Library’ field provided and then sign in using your library membership card number and PIN. Watch our how to video on Borrowbox. Members of other library authorities will need to log in using a different link.
More great recommendations from our colleague Lara in Phibsboro Library. History defines the Deep South as the original seven states of Confederacy, although the term was first used long after the Civil War ended. Before the war, the region was known as the “Lower South" and included Georgia, Florida, northern Alabama, North Louisiana, East Texas, and Mississippi. The term "Deep South" is defined in a variety of ways: most definitions include the states Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana.Oh, but don’t you love that feeling when a good book grabs you and won’t let you go? I’ve just finished Attica Locke’s latest novel Heaven, my Home and can’t wait to read more of her work. Texas Ranger, Darren Matthews, is fighting fires on all fronts. His marriage is just about hanging on, his mother is blackmailing him, and his career is on the line. Against the backdrop of a newly elected Donald Trump and fresh waves of racial violence, Matthews is sent to a sleepy town in East Texas to investigate the case of a 9-year-old boy who goes missing on Caddo Lake.The child is the son of a white supremacist who is currently in jail, and the main suspect is a black man. The story is fast moving and gripping, and the author writes superbly. The murky waters and twisted trees of Lake Caddo serve as a metaphor for all that is hidden beneath the surface of this divided community. Heaven, my home, was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award longlist this year. Locke’s novel, Pleasantville, is also available and I look forward to reading that next!Diane Chamberlain is another American writer, who writes gripping stories set in the Southern states, where respectable facades often hide scandalous truths. Her latest book, Big Lies in a Small Town, weaves two stories together. In 2018, Morgan Christopher, is released from prison on one condition: that she restore an old post office mural in the Southern town of Edenton. The mural hides a darker story however, of jealousy, madness and murder.The story switches back to 1940 when a young woman called Anna Dale, wins a national competition to paint a mural for a post office in a sleepy town in North Carolina. This is a gripping read. If you enjoy this, The Stolen Marriage, by the same author is another page turner where a marriage is not all that it seems, and where everyone is hiding something. There have been many strong female writers who have written about life in the southern American states, often focusing on the continuing legacy of slavery and racial divisions.To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee has become a modern American classic, still much loved sixty years after its publication in 1960. Although classed as a children’s book, it is a wonderful read for any age. I can still remember the first time I read this book in my twenties. I walked around the house reading it as I went, unable to put it down. Told through the eyes of six-year-old Scout, the story recounts the trial of a black man who is accused of raping a white woman in a small town in Alabama. Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, is the lawyer who defends the black man, and is the moral compass of the novel. Loosely based on elements of Harper Lee’s own life, this book was her only published work until Go Set a watchman was published in 2015.Beloved by Toni Morrison is another American text which deals with the horrors of slavery and the psychological impact on those who were enslaved. Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1987 for Beloved. It was inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner who escaped slavery by travelling over the border from Kentucky to Ohio. She was pursued by slave hunters and killed her 2-year-old daughter so that the child would not grow up in slavery. In the story, the family is haunted by the ghost of her baby daughter. The book was adapted into a film in 1998, starring Oprah Winfrey in the leading role.Mildred D. Taylor is most famous for her classic children’s book, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, which was published in 1976 and won the Newbery Medal the following year. The story follows the story of the Logan family, a poor black family who struggle to survive at the height of the Depression in rural Mississippi. Racism is a constant theme in this, and the later books in the series. Her latest book All the days past, All the days to come is the final book of the series on the Logan family.Watch our how to video on Borrowbox.Access eBooks/eAudiobooks on your phone, tablet or reader. Once you have installed the app, search for Dublin in the ‘Library’ field provided and then sign in using your library membership card number and PIN.Members of other library authorities will need to access BorrowBox using a different link
Crime is serious business in Dublin and we love to read about it. From novels about detectives to accounts of serial killers, from gangster biographies to analysis of social issues, we have an appetite for all of it. The series hosted by the Central Library 'Crime in the City: Crime and History', looks at the broad issue of crime in Dublin through the ages.
While Nordic authors and settings seem to dominate my crime reads, the list is not exclusively Northern European I am glad to say. I have even endeavoured to go beyond wider Europe, taking in the US of A, the Middle East, south-east Asia, and even Africa. And it is to Africa that I travel in this post, with two authors to mention, South Africa's Deon Meyer and Zimbabwe's Alexander McCall Smith.
Best selling American crime writer Patricia Cornwell is in Dublin today, here to take part in one of the opening events of the Bram Stoker Festival, happening this weekend. The event, The Anatomy of Fear - From Stoker to Scarpetta with Patricia Cornwell, takes place in Trinity College, and the author will be introduced by the state pathologist, Dr. Marie Cassidy! Very appropriate given the subject matter and the significant role forensic science plays in her Dr. Kay Scarpetta series.Cornwell has sold over 100 million copies of her books worldwide, and wouldn't you know it, you can borrow her books in our branch libraries and read away to your heart's content (check below).Right: Patricia Cornwell in Trinity College, 26th October 2012 (click thumbnail to enlarge)The 20th novel in the Scarpetta series (The Bone Bed) has just been published (25th October in fact), so while not yet on our bookshelves is on order and soon to arrive. In this latest, Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta returns to solve the mysterious disappearance of a palaeontologist.But don't despair, unless you are a Cornwell fanatic and have already read the other nineteen in the series, you have plenty to keep you going in the meantime. So check the links below for availability of the series titles in the library catalogue:Post-mortem (1990)Body of Evidence (1991)All That Remains (1992)Cruel and Unusual (1993)The Body Farm (1994)From Potter's Field (1995)Cause of Death (1996)Unnatural Exposure (1997)Point of Origin (1998)Black Notice (1999)The Last Precinct (2000)Blow Fly (2003)Trace (2004)Predator (2005)Book of the Dead (2007)Scarpetta (2008)The Scarpetta Factor (2009)Port Mortuary (2010)Red Mist (2011)The Bone Bed (2012) (just published, to come)In the following video clip, the bestselling author is talking about her 18th Kay Scarpetta thriller, 'Port Mortuary'.Visit the Patricia Cornwell website.
In September of 2011 we held our first series of ‘Crime and the City’ where over the course of five weeks we had talks from five different authors of fiction, non-fiction and social research - all on the broad topics of crime and drugs.The idea was to bring a cross section of people together to deliver a series of talks that would be relevant as well as entertaining.
