Authors are driven to write by a range of inspirations, everything from compelling character to mysterious plots, from the need to write with pace to an instinctive feel for landscape, from powerful themes to sharply political points that emerge from their stories. For many of the very best crime writers, a major motivation is clearly sense of place; think Colin Dexter and the dreaming spires of Oxford, Ian Rankin and the gloomy tenements of Edinburgh, the brilliant wordsmith Peter May and Scotland’s Highlands and Islands. The same can be said of David Pearson and his Galway Homicides series of crime novels which are set on his beloved west coast of Ireland.
The novels are interlaced with the author’s passion for the area and, as with Messrs Dexter, Rankin and May, that love of place allows him to create stories that have a strong sense of authenticity. To read David Pearson is to feel that you are in Galway, to feel the rain driving in your face and the wind whipping along the coast.
The books in the series are not just about landscape, of course, and each one is driven forward by plots which create a sensed of jeopardy and tension and by beautifully-drawn characters.
Murder at the Caravan is an excellent example, beginning when a woman calls police to report that her brother has not turned up for a festive dinner. The task of investigating his disappearance falls to Sergeant Sean Mulholland at the local Garda station in a small town on the west coast of Ireland. Mulholland heads out to the caravan overlooking the ocean but the missing man is nowhere to be seen and a police search leads to the discovery of a badly-beaten body in undergrowth near the caravan.
As with all the books in the series, David Pearson draws the reader into the narrative, posing questions which demand answers and developing the story with skilful use of the aforementioned sense of place, crackling dialogue and a plot which twists and turns.
Colin Dexter, Ian Rankin and Peter May are well worth a read if you like novels that excel at sense of place but so, this humble reviewer would venture to suggest, is David Pearson if you have not already done so. The fact that his novels regularly appear in the Amazon best-seller lists would seem to suggest that increasing numbers of readers have come to the same conclusion.
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