Wild Houses - Colin Barrett (2024 Booker Prize Nomi ee)

 Colin Barrett's Wild Houses is a solid example of psychological crime fiction, and I recommend it to anyone who, like me, enjoys this subgenre of crime fiction. But for this exercise, my rating scale is a little different from what I use when personally rating non-Booker Prize nominees. In this instance, I am doing as much of a forced ranking exercise as I am an awarding of "stars" to the book. And of the thirteen books nominated for this year's prize, I see Wild Houses fitting solidly in the upper half of the thirteen-book pack, producing a relative rating of something like 3.75 stars. Just something to keep in mind.

Dev lives alone on the outskirts of a small Irish town, seldom leaving his property other than to attend to his basic needs. He quit his job after his mother died, and now lives alone in the family home with his dead mother's old dog. And he likes it that way, so when his two cousins bang on the door late one night with a battered teenager they want to stash somewhere for a few days, Dev is not at all happy about it. But Dev, huge a man as he is, is not the type to put up much of a protest about anything, so he suddenly finds himself with three uninvited guests - two of whom he knows could explode into violence at any moment.

As Dev will learn, it's all part of a revenge plot his cousins have hatched against the teenager's older brother, a man who owes their boss a considerable amount of money. Dev is a simple enough man, but he is far from stupid, and he knows that the likelihood of his rather dim cousins pulling off something as complicated as a kidnapping for ransom and revenge is pretty low - and that he will go down the drain with them when it all blows up. 

So there they are. Three cousins, two of whom are brothers, and a teenager who desperately wants to escape the situation he mysteriously finds himself in. Dev's old house becomes a pressure cooker, and as the hours creep by, it becomes more and more likely that someone is going to explode. Dev and his cousins' prisoner can only hope they are not destroyed by the blast.

Barrett has written a character-driven crime novel here, but one in which he doesn't limit himself to exploring the past of only his four main characters and how each is reacting to what looks more and more like a life or death situation. Instead, Barrett alternates chapters set in the old farmhouse where the boy is being held with chapters showing what the teen hostage's mother and young girlfriend are going through as they reluctantly team up to find the missing boy before it is too late to save him. The best things about Wild Houses are the six or seven characters at its heart, each of them memorable and very real in their own way.

Wild Houses is likely to be one of the best crime fiction novels I read this year - but the Booker Prize competition is stiff this year. And everything is relative.

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Updated Personal Ratings of 2024 Booker Prize Nominees:

The Safekeep - Yael Van Der Wouden - 5.0 stars

James - Percival Everett - 4.5 stars

Wild Houses - Colin Barrett - 3.75 stars

Headshot - Rita Bulwinkel - 3.5 stars

This Strange Eventual History - Claire Messoud - 2.5 stars

Orbital - Samantha Harvey - 2.0 stars