Siobhán MacDonald

I cast my mind back to the time a relative suggested I should consider bridge lessons. I was working full-time as the mother of two lively young boys. “It’ll be great for when you’re a widow,” said my relative - a dubious selling point.

Cats like our garden. Underneath the ash tree, especially. Where our own cat and a much cleverer cat called Sylvester used to air-box. Unfortunately, Sylvester didn’t last long. He disappeared overnight a while back. We suspect he was a cat who knew too much.

Domestic noir is a growing genre. Regular domestic situations are a fertile breeding ground for suspense thrillers. In fact, the more life is presented as "perfect' to the outside world, the more we find very strange goings-on behind closed doors.

As a poor student, I and some friends spent a week in a holiday-home in Barleycove. We arrived from different parts of the country but I’ve no recollection of how we all pitched up. The notion of anyone having access to a car was laughable.

Alarmingly, the clutches of abandoned cars soon became one long, meandering ribbon as far as the eye could see. And this time there was a stream of oncoming traffic. The relaxing, scenic trip had become a game of dare.

Unlike the crime or detective novels that originated in Britain, Ireland’s mystery writing developed differently, reflecting that country’s economic, political, and social development.

Fancy spending an hour or two in some squashy chair in the company of a detective? Ideally, with a gnarly, male investigator, a pint or three short of a smile, or with a kick-ass female investigator whose private life is a smörgåsbord of messy relationships?

She put it to me that would I really want to eat sweets all the time if they were available to me 24/7? A tricky question. I and my pals had been in charge of the lunchtime tuck shop at school the previous term and had done precisely that.