Those We Left Behind

Stuart Neville is one of the finest crime writers working in contemporary literary fiction, and Those We Left Behind is among his best work — a novel that uses the conventions of the police procedural to explore questions of guilt, loyalty, and the malformation of love with unusual psychological depth. Set in Belfast, it follows two brothers, Thomas and Ciaran Devine, as they are released from prison seven years after a murder in which both were implicated when they were children.

Ciaran, the younger brother, confessed to the crime. Thomas, domineering and devoted in the way of people who have decided that love justifies any cruelty, has always maintained his innocence. Now, with Ciaran approaching adulthood and trying to build a life under the supervision of his probation officer, Thomas begins to reassert the hold he has always had. The question that drives the novel — who actually killed the boys’ foster father, and why — is almost secondary to the more unsettling question of what Thomas has made of his brother over seven years in prison.

Detective Sergeant Serena Flanagan, pursuing a sense that something is wrong with Ciaran’s release, is one of the most compelling characters in recent crime fiction. Neville gives her a domestic life — a marriage under strain, children, a cancer scare — that does not function as backdrop but as the mirror in which the Devine brothers’ story is reflected. What does family do to us, for us, against us? The novel has no comfortable answer.

Neville’s Belfast is rendered with the particular texture of someone who knows the city’s post-Troubles geography from the inside — the social housing estates, the residual tribal geography, the particular silence of places where violence happened and was absorbed. The prose is precise and controlled, the pacing expert.

Soho Crime has long been one of the most distinguished imprints in crime fiction, and this novel exemplifies why. Those We Left Behind is crime fiction operating at the level of literature. Essential.