Book Review. The Silent Dead by Claire McGowan. The guns are silent, but for Paula and many around her, there's still no peace in Northern Ireland

I blogged about Claire McGowan’s first Paula Maguire novel The Lost some time ago.  I liked the Paula Maguire character (strong and intelligent, if a little wayward!) and the Northern Ireland setting, where there’s a tension between the desire to just get on with a normal life and the ghosts of murder and violence that touched so many people’s lives, making them prisoners of their past.

In The Silent Dead, Paula is now heavily pregnant, still working and has not resolved the question of her baby’s paternity.  In the opening scenes she goes to a crime scene where a suspected former terrorist has apparently committed suicide.  The “victim” is a member of the Mayday Five, a group responsible for a horrific bombing atrocity.  The other four members of the group have disappeared.  Maguire and the team must track them down to protect them from people who want to deal out their own brand of justice.  As if the case itself isn’t hard enough, Paula also finds clues to the reason for her mother’s disappearance during the Troubles, which lead her to think that her mother may have been an informer for the British Army.  As the story progresses, more bodies turn up, their deaths echoing the excuses they gave for murder years ago.

So, my thoughts.  The setting for the novel and the various back stories have been developed excellently.  It’s a story that’s riddled with moral ambiguity, people’s need to find out not just what really happened in the past, but why and a red raw emotion that drives that desperate want for some sense of justice and atonement.  Together, these make The Silent Dead an incredibly powerful and emotional novel – the best in the series so far.

Final verdict – highly recommended.  If you want to find out more about Clare McGowan and her writing, look at her blog:

http://clairemcgowan.net/

..and finally, please do look out for my review of Anders De La Motte’s new novel Memorandom, which is published on 5 December.  I read a preview copy recently and genuinely couldn’t put it down.

See you again soon.

Romancrimeblogger