Currently reading: BORDERLANDS by Brian McGilloway

Well, as predicted I raced through the very, very good STILL MISSING by Chevy Stevens on Friday night and Saturday, and am now onto another 'new to me' author, and another country for the 2011 edition of Dorte Jakobsen's fantastic Global Reading Challenge (highly recommended - information available and register here).

Scanning my bookshelves again, I decided to go green, so to speak, and head to Ireland with Brian McGilloway's debut BORDERLANDS. I've heard good things about this author, but hadn't yet come across his novels in New Zealand - but while I was in Hanoi at New Years, I picked up a copy of BORDERLANDS from the excellent Bookworm store (a must-visit if you're ever in the Vietnamese capital).

Here's the blurb for the first Devlin book, which was shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger:

"The corpse of local teenager Angela Cashell is found on the Tyrone- Donegal border, between the North and South of Ireland, in an area known as the borderlands. Garda Inspector Benedict Devlin heads the investigation: the only clues are a gold ring placed on the girl's finger and an old photograph, left where she died.

Then another teenager is murdered, and things become further complicated when 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 snow storm 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. A dazzling and lyrical debut crime novel, Borderlands marks the beginning of a compelling new series featuring Inspector Benedict Devlin."

Certainly sounds intriguing, and I like the prospect of a crime novel set on the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland (seems particularly apt for the 2011 Global Reading Challenge).

You can read more about McGilloway at his website here.

Have you read BORDERLANDS, or any of McGilloway's other Devlin tales? If so, what did you think? Do you like reading 'globally' when it comes to crime fiction? Who are some of your favourite Irish crime writers? Comments welcome.