A well written police procedural is one of the reasons I'm so addicted to crime fiction. A good police procedural will introduce you to the police,take you by the land and lead you through their investigation as they unearth clues by interviewing people, sifting the evidence and following leads. There will be a careful balance of detecting and learning about the lives of the detectives. If the author has done the job properly s/he doesn't deliberately hold back clues or have the the detectives catch the culprit in the act, just two pages before the end.
In his first novel, BORDERLANDS, Brian McGilloway has succeeded in all of the above. He has also avoided producing a door stop of a book. At just 227 pages, BORDERLAND doesn't muck about. You're straight into the story with no unnecessary padding. It's something I wish more authors would try to achieve.
If, like me, you enjoy police procedurals, you can't go wrong with BORDERLANDS. I look forward to reading more of McGilloways' writing.
Borderlands
When the corpse of local teenager Angela Cashell is found on the border between the north and south of Ireland, Garda Inspector Benedict Devlin is tasked with heading the investigation: the only clues are a gold ring placed on the girl's finger and an old photograph left where she died.
When another teenager is murdered, Devlin unearths a link between the recent killings and the disappearance of a prostitute twenty-five years earlier—a case in which he believes one of his own colleagues is implicated.
As a thickening snowstorm blurs the border between north and south, Devlin finds the distinction between right and wrong, vengeance and justice, and even police officer and criminal, becoming equally unclear.
One of the most acclaimed debut crime novels of recent years, Borderlands marks the beginning of a compelling new series featuring Inspector Benedict Devlin.
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