Books for 2025: Turn the page after 2024 with the best of Irish fiction and non-fiction

Crime is to the fore in 2025, from the fictional detective Charlie Parker to a real-life familicide and a daughter’s fight for justice, writes Marjorie Brennan

Clockwise from bottom left: Cork author Catherine Ryan Howard’s new crime novel, ‘Burn After Reading’, is about a ghostwriter and a suspected killer; in William Wall’s ‘Writers Anonymous’ an acclaimed author has a secret; solicitor Catherine Kirwan’s ‘The Seventh Body’ is inspired by real events, and John Connolly and Charlie Parker are back on the case in ‘The Children of Eve’. Pictures: Bríd O’Donovan;  Liz Kirwan; Denis Minihane, and Rober Solsona/Europa Press via Getty

Fiction

Cork noir continues to thrive, with this month’s release of The Dark Hours, by Amy Jordan (Harper Collins). A retired detective must return to Cork City for a sinister case from her past. In Burn After Reading (Bantam, March), Cork author Catherine Ryan Howard delivers another deviously plotted thriller, in which a rookie ghostwriter signs up to do the memoirs of a suspected killer.