Book review: Spain’s latest has college backdrop and is a lesson in thriller writing

Twisting plot of 'The Trial' forces us to keep shifting our sympathies and questioning who we can trust until the novel’s final, startling reveal

Jo Spain’s protagonist in ‘The Trial’ is a professor stuck in a mystery involving her ex-boyfriend and pharmaceutical experiments.

• The Trial 
• Jo Spain 
• Quercus, €18.99 

A junior professor of history, Dani MacLochlainn endears herself to her students by suggesting the revolutions of the 19th century were to Europe what 5G is to online clothes shopping.

MacLochlainn has just started lecturing at St Edmund’s, an Irish university that is one of the world’s most prestigious, but she feels her past bubbling up and senses she is being watched.

Ten years ago, MacLochlainn was a student at St Edmund’s — “a place she swore she’d never return to”. 

Back then, she was with Theo. They had met after he’d moved from France especially to study at St Edmund’s renowned School of Medical Research.

But one morning, after 18 months together, Theo woke up beside MacLochlainn, walked out the apartment door, and disappeared.

This is the backdrop to Jo Spain’s 13th novel, The Trial. A polished, surefooted crime thriller, the narrative is packed with detonations that propel the novel towards a grisly denouement.

The Trial is built around two interlocking timelines: 2014 and 2024. In the first, MacLochlainn attempts to understand what happened to Theo.

After finding out that when Theo was 15 he spent time in juvenile detention and then ran away, MacLochlainn begins to question how well she knew her boyfriend.

Weeks after Theo vanishes, MacLochlainn’s mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Knowing almost nothing of the disease, the protagonist poignantly asks the doctor: “Are there ways to stop it? Or even ways to slow it down?”

The second timeline unfolds in 2024.

MacLochlainn’s return to St Edmund’s forces her to confront the twin upheavals in her life.

As well as triggering painful memories of Theo, she learns the medical research school is involved in a groundbreaking clinical trial with a pharmaceutical company to develop a drug that, recalling MacLochlainn’s questions about her mother’s diagnosis, can slow the advance of Alzheimer’s and occasionally reverse its impacts.

But echoing the secrets the protagonist has kept about her life since losing Theo, there are hints that the trial results are being manipulated to hide the drug’s potentially lethal effects.

MacLochlainn feels conflicted: is the risk worth it if some patients benefit?

“I’d give anything to have you back,” she tells her mother.

“Just to see in your eyes that you remember me. To hear your voice, to hear you say you love me.”

Spain’s route to crime writing was unconventional: she was a political advisor to Sinn Féin when she entered the Richard & Judy Search for a Bestseller competition in 2015.

Her manuscript was shortlisted and published as With Our Blessing — the first in a series of six Tom Reynolds mystery novels.

Spain’s fiction is frequently informed by political concerns.

Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes were central to With Our Blessing, while the financial crash provided the milieu for The Confession.

The Trial considers the role of whistleblowers as well as the sometimes-murky relationship between academia and big business.

The crispness of the novel’s dialogue reflects Spain’s experience as a screenwriter: she co-writes the RTÉ television series Harry Wild and is adapting her Tom Reynolds series.

The unlikely ease with which a character guesses the security password for a laptop that contains vital clinical trial data encapsulates aspects of the narrative that fail to convince, but despite these caveats, Spain delivers again.

Written with finesse and tautly paced, The Trial confidently employs the conventions of the crime genre — a sinister atmosphere, a hard-bitten detective, a wily antagonist — and splices them with a touching love story.

Most importantly, Spain’s twisting plot forces us to keep shifting our sympathies and questioning who we can trust until the novel’s final, startling reveal.