Winterland by Alan Glynn

The prose slips but the plot still grips in this taut Irish thriller, writes Mary Fitzgerald

When Gina Rafferty's wayward 26-year-old nephew gets shot in a Dublin pub, she knows what to think. The tabloids are full of lurid tales of gangland feuds; the city's mobsters have even been honoured with nicknames like "the Electrician". But when Gina's more respectable middle-aged brother dies hours later in what looks like a drink-driving accident, she is less sure what to conclude. Especially as her nephew and her brother share the same name.

Alan Glynn's fast-paced drama has its fair share of predictable turns but the stark picture it paints of 21st-century Dublin is arresting. It's a city so quickly transformed by hastily acquired wealth that its inhabitants often find it hard to recognise each other: in the dark, dolled-up girls on a night out could be confused for "a pack of strange animals, roving the plains in search of food and shelter".

At the same time, modern, urban Ireland is no longer a place where a young woman is afraid to speak her mind and Gina Rafferty is certainly cut from this mould. With her suspicions aroused by the coincidence of the two deaths, she starts investigating. Before long, she discovers that her brother's accident may have something to do with a controversial new office block soon to dominate the city's skyline.

Enter painkiller-addled property developer Paddy Norton, a shady figure who reportedly met her brother hours before his car crash. Norton is overseeing the ambitious new building venture. As yet, it's unfinished and the cranes that surround it "look like mechanised high priests, supplicants kneeling before some holy monolith". Not the most delicate of metaphors, but fitting none the less: Noughties Dublin is a spectacularly unsubtle place.

In addition to spinning taut, compulsive narrative, the best thrillers can also be judged on how vividly they capture their local scene and, in this regard, Winterland starts off with promise. Glynn peppers his prose with evocative colloquialisms, but avoids laying them on too heavily, and he echoes the nasal intonations of the city's distinctive accent without resorting to reductive phonetics. His dialogue is at times reminiscent of Patrick McCabe ("Listen you stupid fucking bogman, tell us something we don't know.").

But, as so often happens in this genre, when the plot gathers speed the writing loses texture. The early spark of grim humour fades into the background and the suggestive details – lingered over, for example, in a scene where a husband and wife shovel forkfuls of overpriced scallops into their mouths – become sparser. As the tale reaches its climax, some cliches slip through. "There are different kinds of pain," Norton thinks. "Like the pain of remembering."

But by this point the plot already has you hooked, which means, in a sense, that Glynn has done his job. He has conjured the unreal, transfigured character of Ireland's capital, with its claustrophobic nexus of shady politicians, corrupt property speculators and IRA-turned-"security professionals", as well as its yuppies, its thugs and its drab, lifeless, suburbs where housewives drink vodka and Coke. It's a portrait not too far off the real place, but exaggerated enough to make this an enthralling and addictive read.