reviews
In How To Be Nowhere, Tim MacGabhann’s new novel, published by W&N this month, we catch up with Irish journalist and recovering addict Andrew, introduced to us in the author’s debut work.
This Andrew is a different man to the protagonist of Call Him Mine. He’s adjusting to life, sober, with a new partner, yet forces conspire to drag him back into the past, to his boyfriend Carlos’s murder.
The world MacGabhann creates is authentic, tough, a Central America based on his own experiences of living and working there. It’s bleak, grim, corrupt, unrelenting in its violence – sometimes shockingly so – and yet it’s mesmerising, especially when the author’s love of the region filters through.
This is not a book for the faint of heart. It’s often brutal, its characters uncompromising, their motivations sometimes hard to comprehend, but its themes – addiction, grief, rage, among them – and the author’s sharp, well-crafted prose make it more than just a good action-packed, fast-paced thriller.
Recommended.
How to be nowhere | Tim MacGabhann | W&N | hardback | £16.99 | 23 July 2020
Acknowledgements: This review is published as part of the W&N publisher book tour. Many thanks to Alex Layt, Publicity Manager, Orion Publishing Group, for the invitation and for supplying a review copy. All opinions are our own. All rights reserved. Please check out the other reviews on this tour.
See also: ‘Chris Whitaker’s small-town America’; ‘Nora Roberts’ Sanctuary: an Old Familiar’; Carver’s Nothing Important Happened Today’; By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’; ‘Yvonne Battle-Fenton’s Remembered‘; ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised‘; ‘We should all be feminists‘; The not-so-invisible woman: 150 greats in their own words’; ‘How Penguin learned to fly – Allen Lane and the Original “Penguin Ten”‘; Dorothy L. Sayer’s Busman’s Holiday – Romek Marber for Penguin Crime (book covers we love).
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Tags : action thriller, Call Him Mine, Central American crime, Crime Writers Association, How to be nowhere, Mexican thrillers, Tim MacGabhann