Book of the Week August 13, 2026
In the prosperous Dublin of 2001, technomusic and illegal raves enable kids from the working-class estates of Finglas and Ballymun to mingle joyfully with posh Trinity College students. “It was the great leveller, the scene, all of them chasing the intimacy of it, regardless of background.” Straddling this class divide is DJ Annie Fagan, who grew up on the right side of the tracks, although her boyfriend, Fran Baker, doesn’t quite meet the approval of her affluent Southside friends. But at her crew’s biggest party yet, set in the woods behind the ruins of the notorious 18th-century Hellfire Club, the mysterious disappearance of Seán Salinger, the brother of Annie’s best friend, Rachel, and the son of one of the richest families in Ireland, ends the good times. Twenty-two years later, when Seán’s body, showing signs of blunt force trauma, is discovered in the Dublin mountains, Annie wonders which one of her old friends killed him and why. McPhillips’s second thriller (after When We Were Silent) is an entertainingly twisty, suspenseful story that skillfully alternates timelines between Annie’s exuberant youth and her disappointed-adult present. If the perpetrator is obvious early on, the author’s insightful depiction of the widening social gap between the privileged elite and those with fewer advantages holds the reader’s attention. Also compelling is her portrayal of a marriage so strained that it explodes into domestic violence.—Willy Williams
