SIREN.

SIREN by ANNEMARIE NEARY.

PRESS RELEASE: Published 24th March 2016/Hutchinson/TPB, £12.99

A dark and suspenseful psychological thriller about the slippery nature of truth in post-conflict Ireland, and a redemptive story of a woman claiming back her own identity.


Róisín Burns has spent the past twenty years becoming someone else. The secrets she has kept since she was a naive schoolgirl in Belfast have blighted her existence and ruined her relationships; her life in New York is built on lies. 

Things are beginning to fall apart when a figure from her Belfast childhood flashes up on the news: it's the man who stole her life. These days Brian Lonergan is a smooth sharp suited politician, a family man, the darling of the Irish press. But scandal is brewing and Róisín knows the truth. 

Armed with the evidence that could ruin Lonergan, she travels back across the Atlantic to the remote Lamb Island to hunt him down. 

But Lonergan is one step ahead; when Róisín arrives on the island, someone else is waiting for her…

FIRST SENTENCE {Belfast}: Róisín sensed the danger long before she'd had a chance to think it, when it was just a quivering of something in the air outside the room.

MEMORABLE MOMENT {Page 129}: Róisín tried hard to smoke. Each time it was an effort to get anything out of it, the smoke too bitter, too thick. She liked the idea of poisoning herself, though, sucking the evil into her until she became the same colour as everything else in this bloody place.

SOURCE: Received for review.

MY THOUGHTS: Powerful stuff, incredibly powerful stuff. I don't know which aspect I found more disturbing, the passages set in the Belfast of Róisín's youth or those set some twenty years later when she finds herself on a remote island, armed with the evidence that could ruin the man who ruined her youth and on a very personal mission to lay to rest the ghosts of her past and expose the dirty secrets behind this now seemingly squeaky-clean politician.

Jumping between the different eras didn't prove problematic as it sometimes can with a duel time line, the narrative flowed well, the characters were well penned and, as such, taken as a whole I did enjoy Siren but given the individual threads to the story it was the events of  Róisín's teenage years that I found hugely compelling. The author, perhaps in an attempt to draw out the suspense/tension, arguably lingering too long over the portions of the book dedicated to events on Lamb Island.

The second book by the author that I have had the honour of reviewing. Whilst also set in Belfast, A Parachute In The Lime Tree is a historical fiction. The very different styles proof that Annemarie Neary is a versatile writer.