A Savage Hunger by Claire McGowan

review by Maryom

It's two years after the events of The Silent Dead and Paula Maguire is getting ready to settle down and marry her teenage sweetheart, though not without a few last minute qualms. She's distracted from her personal life though by the disappearance of a student, Alice Morgan, daughter of an important official in the Home Office. Alice was last seen at the remote church outside Ballyterrin where she was doing research, and an important holy relic has disappeared too - the only traces left behind are some bloodstains. Is it pure coincidence that this is the same spot from which another young woman disappeared, back in 1981? or could the two cases be in some strange way connected?

In this fourth case for forensic psychologist Paula Maguire, a lot has changed - the Disappeared Persons unit has been disbanded, some of its members demoted, others moved away, and Paula's private life seems to have settled down (though maybe not for long).
As with any good crime novel, there are numerous suspects and leads that spin off in the wrong directions, but being Northern Ireland, the past, particularly the years of the Troubles, seems ever-present. So while the team work out the hidden secrets behind the present-day crime, things that have been swept under the carpet in the name of the Good Friday Agreement have a nasty habit of popping up again.

Maryom's review - 4 stars
Publisher - Headline
Genre - adult crime 

Claire McGowan: The Silent Dead Blog Tour - author contribution

Today as part of the blog tour to accompany the publication of her latest thriller, The Silent Dead, we're welcoming Claire McGowan to talk about "Writing the Unknown"....


When I’m teaching creative writing, a question that often comes up is whether people are ‘allowed’ to write something. Can you write a character who’s a different gender or age group to you? What about race or economic background? Can you convincingly use a dialect or vernacular that you don’t know well? Are you allowed to write about things you haven’t experienced?

My answer is usually – of course, you’re allowed to write about anything. You don’t have to ask for permission in fiction and it’s not homework. We can make up whatever we like. But I do understand the anxiety that comes from writing something you haven’t gone through yourself. This seems to be so widespread that authors routinely hide their gender with pen names or initials. I’m writing a series about a forensic psychologist who works with the police. I’m not hugely familiar with these worlds, and sometimes I feel unsure about the details – what colour are the walls in police stations? What do the offices smell like? And so on. However, these details can easily be checked by wangling a station visit or researching the procedural processes.

What’s more difficult is to write about emotional situations you haven’t been in. I feel qualified to write about Northern Ireland and the Troubles (I was sixteen with the Good Friday Agreement was signed and living near the border), as I know I have an experience of that time which can’t be challenged. However, I’ve now taken my character to a place where she has a baby, and I don’t have children. I like to think I can imagine it – but I can also get things wrong. A writer friend who has children recently kindly pointed out a small mistake I’d made, which I wouldn’t have known unless I’d been around small children a lot. So there’s always the option to have things checked. I think this anxiety about permission can really hold writers back – so my approach would be write now, and ask questions later. You can always correct it!

The Silent Dead by Claire McGowan

review by Maryom

Five people, four men and a woman, have gone missing from the area around Ballyterrin, near the Northern Ireland/Eire border. All were members of a breakaway Republican group, all suspected, tried, but not convicted, of having planted a bomb which killed sixteen innocent by-standers. Perhaps they've decided to leave the area completely - though for all five of them to do so on the same day seems unlikely - but then bodies start to turn up..... and DI Guy Brooking and his missing persons unit realise they're looking at kidnapping and murder. Who could be behind this increasingly grisly series of deaths - another branch of the Republican movement, one that's now more interested in promoting the peace process and legitimate political careers? Loyalists looking for revenge? Or maybe someone with closer links to the bomb victims?


This third book of the Paula Maguire series sees her caught up in an unusually disturbing case, one which raises issues about punishment and retribution. Popular opinion considers the missing five as terrorists, holding them responsible for a dreadful crime, placing a bomb on a busy high street; should they be entitled to police protection? Wouldn't the world be safer without them?  As the fifth anniversary of the bombing approaches, with the unveiling of a memorial planned, DI Guy Brooking and his team are working against the clock to find out who is responsible for these disappearances.
 Despite being seven months pregnant, and absolutely everyone she knows advising her to take things easy, Paula is convinced that as a forensic psychologist she can play a helpful role in finding the kidnappers and, of course, it helps distract her from the problems of her private life - small things like having a baby in a few weeks time and not being able to name the father, and the ongoing search for her 'disappeared' mother. 
 Set against the backdrop of modern Northern Ireland, Claire McGowan tells a story that will hook you with its twists and turns, but leave you wondering about the deeper issues behind it. It portrays a town still trying to come to terms with its past during the years of the Troubles but trying to build a lasting peace,despite having once been on opposing sides. This is seen through Paula's eyes, with her mother never having been officially accounted for, and through the long terms effects on the bomb victims' families, for whom nothing will ever be the same again.

This isn't a story that's easy to read or one for the squeamish - there are graphic descriptions of the injuries caused by a bomb blast that will upset anyone - but at its heart lies a interestingly knotty moral dilemma. The missing five haven't been found guilty of the crime they're accused of - is it right for others to take justice into their own hands? What do you think?

Maryom's review - 4.5 stars
Publisher - Headline
Genre - adult crime


Paula Maguire 1; The Lost
Paula Maguire 2; The Dead Ground

The Dead Ground by Claire McGowan

"A stolen baby. A murdered woman. A decades-old atrocity. Something connects them all..."

review by Maryom

When a new born baby goes missing from Ballyterrin hospital, everyone at first assumes that it's just a one-off incident. Then a pro-abortion campaigner goes missing and is found dead - gruesomely.  She had plenty of people who objected to what she was doing, had even received death threats, but would anyone have actually carried through on them? Could there somehow be a link between the events? With no good leads to follow the police are still stumbling in the dark when another baby is taken...and a pregnant woman goes missing. There must be a link somewhere, but where..
All these baby-related cases are a bit close to home for forensic psychologist Paula Maguire whose personal life is in turmoil with an unexpected pregnancy- and no clear cut answer to the inevitable question Who's the father? 

The Dead Ground is the second of Claire McGowan's "Paula Maguire" thrillers - set in the Northern Irish border town of Ballyterrin where Paula grew up and to which, after years in London, she's now returned as a forensic psychologist working with a special 'missing persons' unit of the local police. I really enjoyed the first of the series The Lost with a strong female lead, and police and personal plot lines that complemented each other. Happily The Dead Ground continues in this way, proving to be another excellent page-turner, even though I guessed the culprit and motive before the police team did - sometimes I wish I could just step into a book and tell the detectives who to question and what to ask!  Paula's personal life and problems again twist round the police investigation - while she tries to come to terms with her unplanned pregnancy everything at work seems centred round babies too!

 Events unfold from Paula's point of view as the investigation progresses, so there's none of the 'getting inside the killer's head' which I'm too squeamish for. Don't mistake this for cosy crime though. The story opens with a particularly disturbing scene of IRA retribution but although the violence is at times gruesome it always seems relevant and necessary to the plot - not merely thrown in gratuitously.

In Paula and the police team she works with, McGowan has created some great, realistic characters; people that I feel I'm coming to know, with their good points - and bad. I'm really enjoying this series and looking forward to the next book, to the un-folding of some of the personal plot line and, most importantly, discovering who the father of Paula's baby is!

Maryom's review - 4.5 stars
Publisher - Headline
Genre - adult crime

Paula Maguire Book 1; The Lost

The Lost by Claire McGowan

 review by Maryom

Paula Maguire is a forensic psychologist known among the people she works with for too much impulsiveness and a tendency to rush in when police procedures and rules would have her sit quietly in an office. Even so, her ability to get results in missing-persons cases means she's in demand. When two girls go missing within weeks of each other back in Paula's home town of Ballyterrin in Northern Ireland, she's asked to go back there to help out. For a variety of personal reasons, she isn't too keen to return to the place she left 12 years before, but grudgingly goes.
Despite the passage of time, Ballyterrin is a town still smarting from the Troubles - almost everyone seems to have lost a family member during them - but the disappearance of two schoolgirls has shocked the community.
While the police want to follow one line of enquiry, Paula's impulsive streak leads her off on her own, following tenuous links to the Mission, a religious group targeting the town's teenage girls, and trying to find a connection with disappearances back in the 1980s. Her impulsive side also comes out in her personal life - starting a relationship with one of her colleagues and re-igniting one with an old flame!
The Lost is an enjoyable, page-turner of a read - though some of the events are a little predictable, leaving the story less nail-bitingly tense than some crime novels. I'm often opposed to too much personal story-line for the characters, feeling it can get in the way of the crime-solving, but here the progress of the investigation and the revealing of Paula's personal story twist round and complement each other, helping flesh out the characters and giving a nicely balanced read. All of the characters have faults enough to make them real but are still likeable enough for the reader to care about them. Paula's problems seem far from over at the end of the novel and I was certainly left wanting to know what would happen next ...

With a strong female lead and the closeness of the personal and crime sides of the plot, it reminded me of Liza Marklund's thrillers featuring Annika Bengtzon. I hope this is the start of another such great series.


Maryom's review - 4.5 stars
Publisher - Headline
Genre - adult crime