Julia Harte is both a serving and a retired Garda in this thriller, as we follow her through two timelines. The young married woman, still having to push against a male bias in 1994 Ireland, runs up against a serial killer who strikes during THE DARK HOURS.
 
A book featuring Ireland gets my vote, but this one is unreservedly gory and the blood seems to follow Julia around. I had to take a break a few times and go do something more cheerful. Ireland has not had a large number of serial killers, but you wouldn’t know that by reading crime fiction.
 
The 2024 timeline is interspersed and Julia has much the same voice, though complaining about being retired and still feeling haunted by the events caused by James Cox, the serial killer who has recently died in a mental asylum. A copycat killer seems to awaken and the Gardas summon back Julia, who gained academic success with her books on criminology, to help them resolve the issue. To tell the storylines apart, the past is set in the past tense and the present day in the present tense. It’s an interesting literary solution.
 
We don’t get to know too many other people, as Julia is supposed to be off duty quite early in the tale, and spends a lot of time with grieving widows and parents, who are obviously not going to be a big feature in the modern section. Since we’d been given some present case details, I started watching everyone around the original case to see if one might be the past or the modern killer. I’m not saying if this was the right course or a red herring. 
 
Mainly, I would have liked less of people being mired in grief, however laudatory it is to concentrate on the victims’ families, and more of a comparison between Ireland of thirty years ago and today. More computers would seem to be the main difference. This author Amy Jordan has concentrated on the crime in her first novel THE DARK HOURS, set mainly around Cork. She has been a civil servant and a tutor at Munster Technological University. I’m sure she’ll have an interesting future, especially if she turns to writing horror.