{"id":5660,"date":"2026-09-03T01:00:48","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T01:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=5660"},"modified":"2026-09-03T14:58:33","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T14:58:33","slug":"bitter-fruit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=5660","title":{"rendered":"Bitter Fruit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline\"><strong>Book of the Week September 3, 2026<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>The light and darkness that are modern and past Ireland are embodied in Detective Inspector Lewan Kane, who in this kick-in-the-gut debut investigates the death of a man who\u2019s been decapitated and left in an Irish field. As in the best crime fiction, that\u2019s just the surface layer of a tale that takes readers on a journey through geography, the past, and terrible misdeeds and puzzles. Lewan is at first (barely) politely rejecting of help from a young woman whose dreams make her beg him to investigate a seemingly unrelated missing-person case. As the images and names she comes up with start to be relevant to the case, he can no longer ignore her. The symbolism of names plays a major role here, perhaps unsurprisingly given the author\u2019s own meaning-laden name, and add to the idea that every word of this story is to be closely turned in the readers\u2019 hand. <strong>Move over, Tana French.<\/strong><em>\u2014Henrietta Thornton<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Book of the Week September 3, 2026 The light and darkness that are modern and past Ireland are embodied in Detective Inspector Lewan Kane, who in this kick-in-the-gut debut investigates&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5659,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[163,55,65,50,51],"class_list":["post-5660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-book-of-the-week","tag-mystery-detective","tag-police-procedural","tag-suspense","tag-thrillers"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Bitfru-400x400.jpeg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Bitfru-400x600.jpeg","author_info":{"display_name":"Henrietta Thornton","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=4"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5660"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5695,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5660\/revisions\/5695"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}