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I've been getting a lot of great new crime fiction to read lately. Up to, I suppose, the last 6 months, crime fiction has left me colder than a corpse in a cold case. My mother, on the other hand, devours it, with one hand on the remote control watching every conceivable permutation of crime on the tv. She can suss out whodunit quicker than the detective. But recently I've been dipping into some of the books landing on my desk with even greater relish. And you know what? An awful lot of is from Irish writers. I raced through writerÌý new book "Little Girl Lost", set in contemporary Derry with a young PSNI female officer as the central figure.

Last week it was a Scottish thriller writer with a very Irish theme. "" by Catherine Deveney hasÌýthe enigmatic byeline "Is it possible toÌýfall in love with the man who murdered your family?" It's about a Scottish woman whose 3 year old son and husband are killed in an IRA bomb in Glasgow 18 years ago, and, after years of "coping" with it, something snaps in her andÌýshe goes to Ireland to avenge her family.

The thriller quickly turns into a love story which some might find a bit far fetched, but it was written so well, I was still reading it with eyes burning with tiredness out of my sockets at 2am in an all night reading marathon.

Last night, it was and her new book "Taken".ÌýO'Connor , whose day job is as the True Crime editor of the SundayÌýWorld,Ìýreveals that she has taken to crime fiction toÌý"get around the restrictions of libel laws" (a point she makes in a newÌýessay collection "" edited by Declan Burke).ÌýO'Connor's latest crime fiction re -ntroduces Ireland's latest fictional cop, DI Jo Birmingham, whose search for the missing three year old son of a leading model takes her into a Dublin of celebrity, prostitution and gangland murders.

Hope Bord Failte aren't reading it. Emerald Noir lives up to itsÌýname!Ìý