Arlene Hunt’s The Chosen is a change of direction for the Irish crime author. Set between North Carolina and Tennessee, this is her first novel where the action takes place outside Ireland.

When Jessie Conway, a special needs teacher, foils a rampage at a small-town high school, she gains the attentions of the press. Unfortunately for her, she also attracts Caleb Switch’s notice. Switch is a predator who classifies potential victims. He is looking for a prey that will test his skills, a Category A victim, and it seems Jessie may fit the bill.

The Chosen is a serial killer story, but instead of concentrating on the excesses of the killer, the potential victim is fleshed out. Hunt alternates between Jessie and Switch, slowly building tension as the hunter closes in on his unsuspecting prey.

Taut and gripping, The Chosen may be the novel that introduces Hunt to a wider audience.

—

Hot Press magazine website

“CRIME: Blood Money By Arlene Hunt Hachette Books Ireland, 352pp. £12.99

NOW THAT THE fizz has gone out of chick lit and paperbacks with pink covers no longer dominate the bestseller lists, popular fiction has tilted in the direction of crime, with Irish women writers taking on the murder and mayhem that’s the stock in trade of the genre.

Arlene Hunt is something of an old hand, as Blood Money is her sixth novel. It’s an assured crime read centred on an upmarket plastic-surgery clinic in Dublin run by the icy Frieda Mayweather.

Shambolic PI John Quigley has been commissioned by Rose Butler to investigate her daughter’s death. The police think it’s suicide, but Rose can’t believe that her caring mother-of-two doctor daughter could have died this way, and she wants answers. Not being exactly busy, Quigley, whose personal problems include the hole left in his heart by his partner who has fled – he’s an interesting, complex character – takes on the case and uncovers an illegal organ-transplant business being run out of the clinic.

The organs come from eastern Europe, and as the nip-and-tuck business in Dublin has collapsed because of the recession, the brutal and scheming Mayweather has hit on this new lucrative income stream, and she doesn’t care how the organs are harvested.

As Quigley gets close to the truth, super-violent Pavel Sunic is on the rampage from Minsk, looking for the person responsible for the death of his beloved sister, who died when she sold her kidney in exchange for his freedom from prison.

Hunt is a skilled crime writer, able to build and sustain suspense – but never at the expense of credibility – and her dialogue zings with authenticity. The clever plot is carried by a cast of deftly drawn characters, who are all as recognisable as the Dublin locations Hunt puts them in. And there’s humour here, too, mostly in Quigley’s realisation that he’s in danger of becoming a sad, lonely loser and, if he’s not careful, a cliche of a private investigator. He’s a character worth watching out for in future.”

Bernice Harrison.

Though I was not aware the ‘fizz’ had gone out of romantic fiction – I was almost crushed under a pile of Amanda Brunker novels at the airport – this review did fizz up my own morning in a rather pleasant manner. I am ridiculously fond of John Quigley as a character and care deeply how he goes about his shenanigans, so it brings a broad smile to my chops when another reader ‘gets him’, so to speak.

Murder most foul in modern Dublin
18 April 2010 Reviewed by Daragh Brophy

Blood Money

By Arlene Hunt

Hachette Books Ireland, €14

“The latest in her series of detective novels centring on the adventures of QuicK Investigations, Arlene Hunt’s Blood Money is a fast-paced trawl through the murky world of illegal organ transplantation.

We’re introduced to the first of the two main protagonists in a violent opening sequence.

Pavel Sunic is a Bosnian criminal on a crusade to find those responsible for the death of his sister, who died after a botched surgery to remove one of her kidneys.

Back in Dublin, private investigator John Quigley is sought out on a seemingly unrelated matter by the mother of a well-respected doctor who’s apparently taken her own life.

Throughout their respective missions, the two men are kept at opposite ends of the story, as their paths eventually overlap.

The Sunic character is essentially an unreconstructed thug, but one with his own moral code. He doesn’t hesitate to torture and kill as he goes about his hunt for justice and revenge, though the reader is kept more or less onside due to the relative purity of his motivation.

Quigley’s methods, by contrast, are methodical and by the book. If a piece of information comes his way, he works it doggedly until he can figure out the next step of the investigation, eventually building upto a clearer picture of what’s going on.

Overall, it’s a fine crime caper. The various plot strands weave together nicely as the story gathers pace, aided by the short chapters of pared-back prose. The dialogue is functional and snappy, even if it occasionally fails to ring true – for instance, the term ‘naff-off’ is used in earnest at one point, even though actual profanities occur elsewhere, and there are a couple of passages of ‘banter’ between male characters that Guy Ritchie would blush at.

These minor complaints aside, it’s quite the page turner.

T he characters are simply drawn, but no less compelling for it, and the setting of a contemporary post boom Dublin is one that many readers will recognise as authentic.

Long-standing fans of the QuicK Investigations series may miss John Quigley’s partner at the firm, Sarah Kenny, who we’re told went missing in mysterious circumstances some time before the start of this latest instalment.

Her disappearance and Quigley’s attempts to piece together what happened to his fellow PI form a sub-plot here.

Latecomers to the series won’t feel left out, as there’s enough happening elsewhere, but for hardcore fans there’s a clear hint at a sequel. “

This was from yesterday’s Sunday Business Post.

Guy bleedin’ Ritchie? He’s ‘avin’ a laugh mate, innit?

Arlene Hunt

By Edel Coffey – Saturday April 10 2010

Six years ago, Dublin crime writer Arlene Hunt (pictured) was a debut author on the sidelines of Irish fiction. Since then, she has rapidly built up her QuicK Investigations series, featuring private investigators John Quigley and Sarah Kenny set against the familiar backdrop of Dublin streets.

Her last book, Undertow, was nominated for the best crime novel at the 2009 Irish book awards and she has just published her sixth novel (and fifth in the QuicK series), Blood Money.

This time around, John Quigley is investigating the apparent suicide of Alison Cooper, a successful doctor and wife and mother, while his partner Sarah has disappeared without trace after being roughed up in a mugging that happened while John was out of town.

But the story begins far away from these events, with a Bosnian prisoner called Pavel Sunic. He has just been released after his sister Ana, his only surviving relative, sold one of her kidneys to bribe a witness. When she dies as a result of the botched operation, Pavel, a pitiless killer who takes pleasure in torturing and killing, sets out to get revenge.

One of Hunt’s calling cards has always been her unflinching, eye-watering accounts of violence and here we have torture, killings and bone-crunching fights to sate the most blood-thirsty of pulp fiction fans.

Pavel follows a trail of greed and corruption, those crime fiction stalwarts, all the way to Ireland, where his story becomes intertwined with the shiny shop front and crooked underbelly of a Dublin clinic, while John tries to track down his missing partner while solving why Alison killed herself.

The trafficking of human organs is a great premise for a crime novel as it draws in so many different social classes, from surgeons to prisoners, and offers plenty of moral dilemmas and Hunt makes good use of these. It’s also a topic that Hunt can probably bring more emotional veracity to than most as her own father-in-law had a heart transplant 10 years ago.

Blood Money feels very contemporary with the fallout of the recession, unemployment and immigration all featuring in its pages.The book is enjoyably fast-paced, although sometimes a little too fast as Hunt jumps between character perspectives so frequently that you have to play catch-up. That aside, Hunt is a novelist in control of her story and a quick-witted stylist with just the right amount of noir pastiche to make it all enjoyable.

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‘Look,’ I’ll say, ‘reviews, just one person’s opinion innit?’ Well I don’t say ‘innit’ because I was brought up in Wicklow and we don’t bandy ‘innits’ about quite so readily.

But it’s all lies of course. Reviews might be just one person’s opinion, but it’s their opinion on your baby, the product of your blood sweat and tears, that piece of you you’ve released into the world for consumption

So upon opening the Weekend Section of the Irish Times and  spotting a familiar title my pants would be flaming if I didn’t admit to uttering a small but audible ‘eek.’

However! My ‘eeks’ were for naught.

“After reading the blurb of Arlene Hunt’s Undertow (Hachette Books, £11.99) I believed I was in for a jolly, Agatha Christie-type thriller. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The writing here is as hard as flint and twice as combustible. It is set in modern-day Dublin and it shows the dark underbelly of the city’s crime. The two protagonists are Sarah Kenny and John Quigley, who run a private detective agency. They are hired by a pregnant young girl to find the father of her child, one Orie Kavlar. Orie is involved in people smuggling, especially Eastern European women who are put working in nightclubs. Finding him opens up an ant’s nest for the two detectives and they are soon up to their armpits in violence and bodies. This is a gritty and action-filled offering that pulls no punches.”

Hard as flint and twice as combustible. Indeed.