Book review: Irish slow-burn mystery grips

Andrea Carter fleshes out the plot of 'There Came A-Tapping' with supernatural elements and a kind of mystery within a mystery

Andrea Carter utilises an unreliable narrator to further shroud the mystery of her latest thriller.

• There Came A-Tapping 
• Andrea Carter 
• Constable, €15.99

In her Inishowen mysteries, Andrea Carter used a slow pace and Agatha Christie flourishes to investigate a series of polite murders in rural Donegal. 

Very elegant they were too, but in this, her first standalone novel, she moves closer to home. 

Ms Carter grew up in Ballyfin, Co Laois, and the Slieve Bloom mountains form an atmospheric backdrop to this eerie tale of trauma and absence.

Legal executive Allie Garvey lives in Dublin with her boyfriend Rory O’Riordan, a documentary-maker some 12 years her senior. 

He’s been down in Galway shooting a film, and Allie is perplexed when he fails to return home. After an anxious couple of days, she phones the police and a missing persons file is opened. 

Rory was caught on CCTV using a toll in Ballinasloe, but thereafter vanished without a trace, leaving Allie and his family to fear the worst.

She’s trying to digest this news when a Polish couple arrive at her apartment claiming Rory had leased it out to them.

She then finds out from Rory’s solicitor that he has bought a rundown cottage in the Slieve Blooms: Evicted from her home and seeing no alternative, Allie moves to Co Laois.

Raven Cottage has been vacant for several years, the previous tenants having left in a hurry. 

Locals say it’s haunted, and Allie is initially spooked by a tribe of ravens that watch her from the trees. 

At night time, she wakes at all hours convinced she’s not alone, and is intrigued when she discovers that a supposed spirit medium called Eliza Dunne lived there in the 1890s.

In the local town, she befriends a cafe owner called Maggie, who turns out to be Eliza Dunne’s great great granddaughter. 

At the cottage, meanwhile, nocturnal happenings intensify, and then Allie is hit by another blow: Rory’s car is found submerged off the end of a Mayo pier, and there’s a body inside.

There Came a Tapping is told from two points of view, Allie’s narration interrupted now and then by the more measured perspective of investigating Garda Suzanne Phelan, who quickly realises that Allie may not be a reliable witness. 

She drinks wine in the afternoons, lives on her nerves, and is haunted by a car accident which killed her parents when she was in her teens.

Might Allie have killed Rory, Suzanne’s partner Dave — a tubby misogynist — wonders aloud? 

It seems unlikely: Rory was having money problems, and may not have been the perfect boyfriend he seemed.

Andrea Carter fleshes out her plot with supernatural elements and a kind of mystery within a mystery concerning Eliza Dunne, whose disappearance may also have been suspicious. 

Her primary ambition here is to take us inside the mind of a woman short on confidence and plagued by misplaced guilt.

She does so reasonably well, and through the clumsy but well-intentioned interventions of her sister Olivia, we discover that Allie has endured a subtly controlling relationship.

The supernatural elements are nicely handled, leaving Allie’s experiences open to interpretation — in fact I think I wanted more of them. But the plot sags a little in the middle, as Allie frets and not a lot happens.

Descriptive evocations of natural surroundings can greatly enhance dramatic tension, but here they are perhaps too perfunctory, and while a dramatic late plot twist is well concealed, I’m not entirely sure I bought it.

Still, Allie is an engaging protagonist, and the book’s slow mystery kept me engaged until the very end.