Not for the faint-hearted! Book Review of Ghosts of the Desert by Ryan Ireland

Warning! Hard core violence and psychological gore. I wasn’t going to review this book as it contains more violence than I’m comfortable with. However, it is well written, unusual and complex. So if you like your crime hard core and challenging then this might just be the book for you.

I love the cover – it’s what made me pick up the book. It is a nod to the Western genre, but more Clint Eastwood or Spaghetti Western than John Wayne. However, the setting is not the adventurous West of the turn of the 19th Century, but the contemporary bleakness of abandoned ghost towns in a harsh arrid environment.

The protagonist, a morally ambivalent anthropologist, gets lost in a desert in the American Midwest during a research trip. I don’t know what is more chilling – what happens to him after he is ‘saved’ by a group of people or what takes place in his inner world. This book is a great reminder of just how thin the veneer of our civilisation is. At more than one point in the book you wonder if the heat of the desert is messing with your mind. And yes, people get killed too, but there is no Miss Marple on the scene to make sense of it all.

This is the American author’s second book. Ghosts of the Desert was published in May 2016 in paperback by Point Blank. £8.99.

Indiana Brown