Doubt is the dominant key of Mark O’Connell’s exhilarating A Thread of Violence, a probing portrait of one of the most notorious murderers in recent Irish history ... O’Connell periodically interrupts his narration with what he calls 'meta ruminations' on such matters as truth and doubt. Eschewing the novelistic conventions of so many true-crime accounts, with their shifting points of view and you-were-there immediacy, he adopts instead the skeptical tone of the essayist ... Which brings us back to that epigraph from Camus. O’Connell admits that he wanted a 'reckoning' from Macarthur, 'wanted him to be Raskolnikov,' wanted him to realize, with O’Connell’s patient assistance, what he had done, and why. But there was to be no such reckoning. As O’Connell concedes in this brilliant and rigorously honest book, Macarthur 'had failed me as a character. He had denied me the satisfaction of an ending.'

It reads like a seance with the spirits of the still-living. Immaculately paced, A Thread of Violence generates a suspense that is formal and narratorial as much as it is a corollary of genre: we read it rapt with curiosity as to how the author will avoid the ethical pitfalls up ahead, how he can possibly pull this off without sensationalism or vulgarity. The moral murkiness of writing such a book at all is intrinsic to its architecture: there’s no getting around that, by fixing his attention on a double murderer, the prestigious writer effectively signs an endorsement on the jacket cover of Malcolm Macarthur’s life, declaring it darkly riveting, profound in its moral implications ... Eschewing the jokes and stylistic brio of his earlier work in favor of a stark lucidity, O’Connell sees in the 'highborn savage' Macarthur a grotesque mirror to his own upper middle-class privilege, and in his crimes an irreducible mystery that is indistinguishable from blunt mundanity. Resolved not to lose sight of the horror of what Macarthur calls his 'criminal episode,' O’Connell nonetheless grants his subject a fair hearing, writing about the elderly murderer with, if not quite a redeeming empathy, a spooked and perplexed grace ... A Thread of Violence instils the certitude not only that no one else could have written this book, but that no other need ever be written on the subject. It’s a marvel of tact, attentiveness, and unclouded moral acuity.

The unbelievability is probably most resonant. The cliche that truth is stranger than fiction hangs over this story ... The impulse to explore and unravel fictions is just the right instinct ... A remarkable book.

That very human need to understand growls in the background of every page, drives O’Connell, fuels, alongside crass voyeurism, the true-crime boom. There’s an instinct to search for reasons. Not excuses, necessarily, but something we can all point to by way of explanation, reassuring ourselves that we’ve identified the cause of the horror ... This is also a book about privilege, the people it forms, and as such it becomes about the writer as much as the subject. In assessing his own life, O’Connell finds the similarities with the killer that make the differences all the harder to explain. Shared experiences do not create equal minds ... A Thread of Violence is a tantalizing book, forever reaching out toward ungraspable truths, fingers brushing against them before they slip away again. O’Connell is wandering through the unmapped wilds of the human psyche, in search of the unfindable. Interesting, intelligent, very readable, but inevitably as frustrating as its central figure. There can be no neat wrapping up, no complete understanding, only the awkward sense of a conclusion without finality.

...while O’Connell tells the story of the crimes, their background and their fallout with painstaking care, his approach is too restrained and self-searching for state-of-the-nation diagnostics or political allegory around class and power. He has produced a profound meditation on violence and its roots, on the skeining of barbarism and high culture, and on our urge to make sense of chaos and brutality ... The story is compellingly told, with the structure and pacing taut, the writing deft and limpid, all marked by an absorbing honesty and ethical concern. Crucially, the moral intelligence with which he treats the themes, including the plight of the victims, explodes the idea that the criminal is interesting for reasons of diabolical glamour ... this book is an outstanding achievement, and a worthy addition to literary attempts to understand the human propensity for evil.

Do any of these stories adequately account for Macarthur and his crimes? And more than 40 years after the fact, how could you tell? This unstable stratigraphy of truth and fiction is the subject of Mark O’Connell’s third book, A Thread of Violence. It is one of the most disturbing things I’ve read for a good while ... while the DNA of O’Connell’s book lies in literary true crime such as In Cold Blood, its true debt is to the metafictional detective stories of novelists such as Paul Auster. It is as much about the process of writing about – and the apparent impossibility of understanding – a murderer, as it is about Macarthur himself ... In the main, this self-reflective poise works well. O’Connell is a gripping writer and some episodes have a scalding chill ... occasionally, the approach shows its limits. O’Connell does not give many details about the victims’ lives. He argues that to do so would be prurient: his book is about Macarthur and how the killings have stained his life...It’s an admirable idea. But in the context of this book, especially to readers unfamiliar with the story, it means they become ciphers ... by the book’s end, that evil has again slipped from sight. Macarthur exits as he arrives: a shadow, a void, capable of vanishing even within his own story. O’Connell never succeeds in pinning him down. On its own terms then, A Thread of Violence is a failure. But what a fantastically interesting one.

...we get O’Connell’s relentlessly self-conscious reflections on his tangled motivations for taking up the project, constantly anticipating, if not always answering, every ethical objection a reader might raise. In a sense this is a book that critiques itself as it proceeds, and, to its author’s great credit, it doesn’t always like what it finds ... there are moments when the delicate ethical arithmetic falters and the suspicion arises that O’Connell is trying to have it both ways, especially around his responsibility to the victims and their families. Faced with the burden of describing the first murder, he insists that it can’t be done, when he has just spent the previous paragraph doing exactly that, in vivid snapshots...He agonizes over the best strategy to avoid his book causing further anguish to the bereaved, but never lets himself consider the obvious solution: that he not write it at all. These are, however, brief lapses in an engrossing study, thick with moral ambiguity and startling detail, a rare volume that should appeal equally to the exacting creative nonfiction maven and the insatiable true-crime addict.

Complicity hovers over these pages like a hawkmoth. Who is really controlling the narrative? Is it Macarthur: hosting O’Connell in a modest flat where the murderer’s bookshelf and a rarely watched television are sealed in black plastic? Or is it a beady-eyed journalist, probing for information and — above all — any evidence of guilt, while deploying literary strategies to shield his own engagement? A friend helpfully reminds O’Connell that Macarthur is 'a real person . . . a man who did terrible things.' Surely, after interrogating the murderer for more than a year, this intensely self-aware writer needs no friend to underline Macarthur’s monstrosity? But a mesmerised reader might welcome that jolt. ... O’Connell declares his own belief in 'reality as a niche sub-genre of fiction.' Suggestive though that statement is, it contributes to the reader’s sense of doubt about what to believe, and whom to trust, in a clever and thoroughly disquieting book.

O’Connell’s new book...is at once his most classically journalistic and his most personal, as well as his most ambitious and accomplished ... A Thread of Violence reads like a book about a journalist and a murderer written in the disabused aftermath of Janet Malcolm’s influential monograph. Its narrator has absorbed Malcolm’s insights, moral and literary – perhaps a little too thoroughly ... O’Connell’s intelligent, in many ways honourable self-probing gives the book an engaging immediacy. But at times it fogs up the pane through which we might have gained a clearer view of Macarthur. Janet Malcolm’s virtues as a portraitist arose in part from the charged setting conjured by her inscrutable persona. The Superman she fashioned for herself had the superheroic nerve, borrowed from psychoanalysis, to behave as if interpretation only travels in one direction ... O’Connell’s self-questioning narrator is a more humane presence than Malcolm’s, but he rarely provides the wicked satisfactions of brazen scrutiny and barbed insinuation at which Malcolm excelled.

A project like this leaves an author open to accusations of having their cake and eating it too, producing a critique of a form that also indulges in its conventions. But in denying us an epiphanic conclusion, and by exposing the structures (interviews, police reports, previous retellings) beneath his narrative, O’Connell tries to circumvent this problem by performing a sort of reverse citation ... Fittingly, this impressive, compulsive work ends on a note of deep disquiet about its own existence. A Thread of Violence feels like a challenge to the idea of writing such stories at all.

Relating Macarthur’s crimes and everything written about them, obsessing over details true and imagined, O’Connell compares himself to “a prospector who had struck a rich vein of crude oil.” He is, in other words, absolutely in on the exploitation of his exercise, and our role in reading it. Alas, readers will be powerless to stop, beguiled by the book’s powerful undercurrent: a deliberation over how we spend our lives trying to make all-encompassing, narrative sense of them, all the while dogged by the limitations of both reality and our imaginations.

...an engrossing and intimate glimpse into the psyche of an actual yet improbable murderer ... O'Connell is a patient, thorough interlocutor, especially in conversations where his predominant feeling was frustration with Macarthur's rationalizations and evasions. The insights O'Connell offers into his own emotions are also revealing, producing a case study about the chilling ease with which one man can be driven to murder.

Erudite, seemingly emotionless, haughty, absolutely unrepentant, and elusive, Macarthur evaded easy analysis. The resulting picture of the killer is seen as if through a proverbial dark glass—and it’s as chilling, in the end, as any Hitchcock film. A superb study of real-life crime and punishment, to say nothing of sociopathy in action.

Swirling together dogged reporting with questions about the media’s coverage of crime, O’Connell manages a gripping account that casts a skeptical eye on its own genre. Even readers put off by profiles of killers will be piqued.