RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)The awful thing in life is, everyone has their reasons,\' Jean Renoir’s great line from The Rules of the Game, could serve as an epigraph to the book. Vulnerable, unstable Luke’s rise to stardom via early gigs at the Baggot Inn and the Olympia is superbly done; Will’s drive and charm are as persuasive as his reflexive sexism and predatory behaviour are disturbing; Brian’s middle-child victimhood breeds a meanness that mutates into blithely entitled extortion. It all adds up to a bleak domestic saga studded with set-piece events that mark social history milestones of the last 50 years ... Exploring eating disorders, #MeToo moments and gender identity issues, the novel speaks very much to the contemporary moment; the eponymous cruelties, while often melodramatic, sometimes luridly so, are securely rooted, tragically but all too credibly, in the family plot ... What a terrific storyteller Liz Nugent is! Brilliantly structured, fluently told, rich in unsettling incident and pulsing with dark, tumultuous energy...her best book yet.
Tana French
MixedThe Irish TimesTana French’s much-loved Dublin Murder Squad series is one of the outstanding achievements in contemporary crime fiction ... there is nature writing here of extraordinary beauty – but it means the turbulent energy that usually pulses through a French novel is subdued, the suspense not quite as compelling. The plot is scant and the storytelling leisurely: almost nothing at all happens for the first 100 pages, and only in the final third do sparks begin to fly ... The Searcher is never less than an absorbing read – French is incapable of writing a graceless sentence – but now that she has had her rural sojourn, I do hope she will return to the tumultuous streets of the city that sustains her finest work: Dublin.
Laura Lippman
RaveThe Irish Times\"What is brilliant about Lippman’s achievement here is how she has reimagined the dark beauty and fever-dream erotic intensity of her noir touchstone and melded it with the uneasy will-you-won’t-you of the bourgeois mating ritual ... Rich philosophy for a noir tale to sustain, but Lippman handles it with masterly flair, delivering a thrilling succession of revelations and perfectly weighted twists in a fluent prose liberally salted with side-of-the-mouth wit and wisdom.\
