Taken
By Niamh O’Connor
Transworld Ireland £6.99, pp394
O’Connor’s heroine is Detective Inspector Jo Birmingham, a self-consciously hard-nosed gumshoe who assumes control of a case involving the abduction of a model’s young son, despite the protestations of her superior and former husband, macho-sounding Chief Superintendent Dan Mason. “The older he got, the more ... he looked like Jason Statham in the Guy Ritchie films,” she muses early on, setting the classy, soft-boiled tone. Operating out of Store Street’s cliché-central police station in post-boom Dublin (“Just give me 24 hours on the case, that’s all I ask”), this mix of Carrie Bradshaw and Carrie Crowley’s garda officer from Rásaí na Gaillimhe soon finds herself embroiled in a hackneyed plot involving prostitutes, property magnates, porn peddlers, pampered professional footballers, paedos and psychos. Helping Birmingham in her investigations is a crew of world-weary cops, whose life stories are exaggerated for added world-weariness. There’s the separated sergeant whose daughter has Down’s syndrome; the inspector whose wife has committed suicide; and the detective who lost her spleen “after a pimp got territorial”. Completely over the top, it makes for a perversely compelling read.