Book review: Crime meets romance as Maeve series turns up heat

Jane Casey author. Photograph MOya Nolan

• The Close 
• Jane Casey 
• Harper Collins, £14.99

SOMETIMES books are more than books, they’re events. The Close is undeniably an event. Since The Burning in 2010, London-based Dubliner Jane Casey has been subjecting readers to an exquisite torture over the course of nine novels. In this, the tenth in the Maeve Kerrigan series, she somehow manages to dial up both the pleasure and the pain. It’s a neat trick by Casey, a consummate writer, working at the height of her powers.

Casey is bound to gain an even larger fanbase soon: the much-anticipated screen adaptation of her 2021 standalone The Killing Kind is filming currently.

Twice a winner of the Irish Crime Novel of the Year, in 2015 Casey also won the Mary Higgins Clark award, one of the prizes given out annually at the Mystery Writers of America Edgars ceremony. The qualifying criteria for the Mary Higgins Clark require a novel’s protagonist to be ‘a nice young woman with an interesting job’ whose life is ‘suddenly invaded’ and who ‘solves her problem by her own courage and intelligence’. Sounds like Maeve Kerrigan, whose too-interesting-by-far job is as a Detective Sergeant in the London Met.

The Maeve books are police procedurals and, however transcendent her prose may be, no one would ever accuse Casey of ‘transcending the genre’, a grievous insult for a real crime-writer. Because Casey is a real crime-writer, often borrowing from news stories for her impeccably crafted plots.

But, as female readers will instantly recognise, Casey also borrows freely from other genres. Which brings us to Maeve’s boss and current landlord, the chiselled, mercurial and fiercely clever DI Josh Derwent, wandered in from a bodice-ripping Regency romance, yet blokeishly contemporary, utterly believable and, at the back of it all, thoroughly decent.

The Close opens with Maeve ‘standing in silence near a body, trying to catch the faintest echo of what had happened’. A doctor has been found dead in a hospital car park. Maeve is in charge of the investigation but not yet fully recovered from the physical and psychological trauma of the events chronicled in 2020’s The Cutting Place. She’s coasting, going through the motions. She knows it, and Derwent does too. When an opportunity arises for an undercover surveillance operation on another case, he persuades her to accompany him. Posing as a couple, they leave central London and decamp to a house in The Close, on a road so quiet ‘the bin men coming early caused a scandal’. But the estate isn’t half as dull as it seems. Danger lurks nearby. Unbeknownst to them, one of their neighbours harbours murderous intent.

And there’s the close relationship between Maeve and Derwent, in closer proximity, and for longer, than ever before; thrown together, away from their regular lives; as Maeve puts it, ‘the two of us, on our own ... it’s like being on a desert island.’ Add in a heatwave, and the stage is set for the ultimate game of ‘will they, won’t they?’ It’s hard to convey adequately how much more all of this amounts to than the sum of its parts. The Close is so good that it’s impossible to describe without gushing. But, if you haven’t read a Maeve previously, you might think that you can’t read The Close before working through the rest of the series. You can and you should, for two reasons. Firstly, the current novel is always the most easily available. Secondly, afterwards, while the rest of us will have to wait, bereft, for the eleventh book, you’ll still have nine Maeves left to read.