Contemporary Authors

• This Is How It Ends ( novel) Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2018

• Irish Times - https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/eva-dolan-on-embracing-rejection-1.1888125

  Eva Dolan on embracing rejection
  This week, to mark the end of our How to Write a Book series, we have a daily Q&A with a debut author
  Sat, Aug 9, 2014, 12:00
  Author Eva Dolan

  Author Eva Dolan

  Eva Dolan is an Essex-based copywriter, who was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger for unpublished authors as a teenager. Her first novel is Long Way Home and the second book in the series will be published in 2015. What was the first book to make an impression on you? The Witches by Roald Dahl.

  What was your favourite book as a child? The Chrysalids by John Wyndham.

  And what is your favourite book or books now? Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels.

  What is your favourite quotation? “Life is a gamble, at terrible odds – if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it.” Who is your favourite fictional character? Becky Sharpe.

  Who is the most underrated Irish author? Molly Keane’s books deserve a wider audience.

  Which do you prefer – ebooks or the traditional print version? Ebooks for paperbacks, print for hardbacks.

  What is the most beautiful book you own? An illustrated edition of The Odyssey I was given as a child.

  Where and how do you write? Heavily caffeinated in my study, at a desk facing a blank wall to minimise distractions.

  What book changed the way you think about fiction? Mrs Dalloway.

  What is the most research you have done for a book? The subject matter of Long Way Home was completely new to me so needed a lot of research.

  What book influenced you the most? Harrington on Hold ’Em – fixed some major leaks in my poker game.

  What book would you give to a friend’s child on their 18th birthday? Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates as a warning against conformity.

  What book do you wish you had read when you were young? The Catcher in the Rye. Suspect the impact was lost on me in my 20s.

  What advice would you give to an aspiring author? Embrace rejection; it hurts but it’s inevitable and you will learn from it.

  What weight do you give reviews? Depends who the reviewer is . . .

  Where do you see the publishing industry going? It will adapt and survive, as always, but I think it will become increasingly polarised.

  What writing trends have struck you lately? Cross-genre fiction is throwing up some interesting books.

  What lessons have you learned about life from reading? Reading probably isn’t the best way to learn life lessons.

  What has being a writer taught you? That a suspicious mind is a valuable asset.

  Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party? Elmore Leonard, Al Alvarez, Christopher Marlowe, Agatha Christie and Martin Amis.

  What is the funniest scene you’ve read? Nonfiction, but the mention in Tim Moore’s Gironimo about a rider in the 1914 Giro being accompanied by his mother on a penny farthing, feeding him porridge and hitting hostile fans with an umbrella, made me giggle.

  What is your favourite word? Rambunctious.

  If you were to write a historical novel, which event or figure would be your subject? Rasputin has always fascinated me.

  Take the first step to your debut novel with the Irish Times How to Write a Book series.

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QUOTED: "The novel is cleverly plotted; Dolan nicely ramps up suspense on the way to its shocking ending."

This Is How It Ends
Publishers Weekly.
265.4 (Jan. 22, 2018): p62. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
This Is How It Ends
Eva Dolan. Bloomsbury, $27 (336p) ISBN 9781-63557-052-6
British crime writer Dolan (the Zigic and Ferreira series) delivers an intriguing standalone about a crime involving a London police official's daughter and secret motives. Narrator and protagonist Ella Riordan, a police academy dropout and aspiring writer, meets the novel's second narrator, Molly Fader, a photographer who documents protest movements, when a policeman bashes Ella during a peaceful demonstration. The two, now friends united by their revolutionary spirit, join forces to protest the real estate developers taking over Molly's apartment building in order to build more expensive high-rise buildings while the dwindling tenants put up with horrific conditions. Ella, hoping to make the place a cause celebre to enhance her revolutionary credentials, throws a party there. Someone from Ella's past crashes the party and ends updead by Ella's hand--in self-defense, Ella claims to Molly. Molly believes Ella's claim and helps her make it look like an accident. Is Ella who she says she is, or are her real intentions nefarious? The novel is cleverly plotted; Dolan nicely ramps up suspense on the way to its shocking ending. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"This Is How It Ends." Publishers Weekly, 22 Jan. 2018, p. 62. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525839770/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=29fc681e. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525839770

QUOTED: "The story takes a considerable amount of concentration to follow, but it pays off in a stunning conclusion."

1 of 3 6/3/18, 4:36 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
This Is How It Ends
Jane Murphy
Booklist.
114.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2018): p50. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
This Is How It Ends.
By Eva Dolan.
Mar. 2018.336p. Bloomsbury, $27 (9781635570526); e-book, $11.99 (9781635570540).
Dolan was short-listed for the British Crime Writers' Association Dagger when she was just a teenager. Her Zigic and Ferreira crime series, featuring two detectives from the Peterborough Hate Crimes Unit, debuted in 2014 and has been optioned for British television. In this stand- alone, her ability to write a complex and nuanced psychological thriller is clearly manifest. Two women, Ella and Molly, have been working with an anti-gentrification faction to protect the remaining residents of a social-housing building in London slated for demolition. When Ella finds the dead body of an unknown man in her flat, Molly convinces her that the police won't believe she's innocent because of her unpopular political affiliations, and the two women hide the body. But when a neighbor tells Molly that he heard Ella arguing with a man in the hallway, and Ella learns some compromising information about Molly, their close relationship begins to unravel. Told from their alternating perceptions, backward and forward through time, the story takes a considerable amount of concentration to follow, but it pays off in a stunning conclusion that makes you want to reread the whole book to figure out how you missed what was really going on. Recommend to fans of social realism in crime fiction, from Georges Simenon straight on through to Dennis Lehane.--Jane Murphy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Murphy, Jane. "This Is How It Ends." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2018, p. 50. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525185633/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=b4ca4506. Accessed 3 June 2018.
2 of 3 6/3/18, 4:36 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525185633
3 of 3 6/3/18, 4:36 PM

• iNews
  https://inews.co.uk/culture/book-week-ends-eva-dolan-wonderfully-prescient-thriller/
  Word count: 778

  QUOTED: "Dolan is a master of pace and it’s fascinating watching the real Ella slowly emerge. Ultimately this smart, deftly-told story resonates so strongly because of the complex, claustrophobic central relationship at its heart: like Molly we are drawn inexorably to Ella’s flame and like her unable to step away even when it might burn."

  Book of the Week: This is How it Ends, by Eva Dolan – a wonderfully prescient thriller
  Eva Dolan, photographed by Mark Vessey
  Sarah Hughes Sarah Hughes 5 months Thursday January 4th 2018

  Increasingly if you want to read fiction that reflects the world in which we are living, your best bet is to pick up a crime novel. From long-established practitioners such as Ian Rankin to rising stars such Eva Dolan the best modern crime novels manage to both delve deep into our darkest impulses and examine bigger questions about the way in which we live our lives. Dolan, in particular, excels at presenting readers with knotty, addictive tales that also force the reader to think more widely about the society we’re living in and the way in which its most vulnerable members are treated.

  Her previous four novels, which follow detective pairing DI Dushan Zigic and DS Mel Ferreira and their work in the Peterborough Hate Crimes Unit, have covered everything from violent crimes against trans women to rising tensions about immigration. They are richly imagined, cleverly plotted and socially aware stories, which will also have you turning the pages well into the small hours.

  Ella is a young, attractive and highly visible campaigner for housing rights. On the night of her greatest triumph, a party to celebrate her upcoming book about gentrification, she calls her friend Molly and asks for her help disposing of a body

  This Is How It Ends – her first standalone and the book that her publishers hope will propel her onto the crime fiction A List – has a wonderfully prescient premise. Ella is a young, attractive and highly visible campaigner for housing rights. On the night of her greatest triumph, a party to celebrate her upcoming book about gentrification and a successful Kickstarter campaign raising money for a homeless shelter, she calls her friend Molly away from the festivities in a soon-to-be redeveloped tower block to one of the building’s abandoned flats and asks for her help disposing of a body. Whose? And Why?

  “Of course it was an accident,” Molly thinks. “Ella is a peaceful girl, too small and too smart for violence. He’ll have had a fit or a stroke, the result of some obscure hidden condition, the kind that occasionally cuts down the young without warning. Or he’ll have taken something that got the better of his system. Either way, a stumble, an unlucky fall against the tiles. An accident, just like Ella says.”

  But was it? As the story progresses so the older Molly, herself a protest veteran with a long-activist history stretching back to the heady days of Greenham Common, finds herself beginning to doubt Ella’s story. Is there more to this photogenic young protester than the socially concerned face she presents to the world? Why did she befriend Molly? What does she really want from the campaign to protect the inhabitants of Castle Rise? And who exactly was the dead man to her?

  Dolan keeps the tension rising as she expertly juggles two distinct voices and timelines. While Molly’s story plays out in the present from the moment Ella asks for her help with the body to the bleak and brilliant conclusion, Ella’s unspools backwards from her desperate call to Molly through her frustrations as a young blogger trying to make her name (“He knew it annoyed her how so much of the press had been focussed on her youth and her looks… although according to the trolls who targeted her day and night, she was ‘too gross to get raped’”) to the dark and complicated past she has hidden from her friends.

  Occasionally the tricksiness of having Ella’s timeline unfold backwards threatens to derail the main plot but Dolan is a master of pace and it’s fascinating watching the real Ella slowly emerge.

  Ultimately this smart, deftly-told story resonates so strongly because of the complex, claustrophobic central relationship at its heart: like Molly we are drawn inexorably to Ella’s flame and like her unable to step away even when it might burn.

  ‘This is How it Ends’ by Eva Dolan is published by Bloomsbury (£12.99)

• The Hindu
  http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/this-is-how-it-ends-by-eva-dolan-review-bring-up-the-bodies/article23269868.ece
  Word count: 447

  QUOTED: "Dolan is a fine wordsmith whose lucid prose and compelling voice create an atmosphere of tenseness, of bleakness, of desperation. Both her protagonists, though not completely likeable, have been fleshed out well."

  This Is How It Ends by Eva Dolan review — Bring up the bodies
  Preeti Zachariah
  March 17, 2018 16:00 IST
  Updated: March 18, 2018 12:17 IST
  This Is How It Ends by Eva Dolan review — Bring up the bodies
  more-in
  Exhumes a host of social issues and not just a corpse

  The ghosts of happiness past still lingers in the Castle Rise apartment block, “unquestionably ugly. Low and long and squat, built in rough, reddish-brown bricks which reminded her [Ella] of public toilets in dodgy parks and shopping centres in dying cities.” They press against Ella Riordan, idealistic, impassioned and very scared: a dead man lies in her flat, and she has just called for help. Enter Molly, the second protagonist, an older documentary-photographer who has taken Ella under her wing. Together they hide the body in the building’s elevator shaft. And this sets the scene for all that follows.

  As the book progresses, however, you realise that everything may not be as clear-cut as it seems.

  Told through two voices — Ella’s and Molly’s — and switching, sometimes rather abruptly, between the past and the present, Eva Dolan’s This Is How It Ends is part psychological thriller, part social commentary.

  The gritty narrative, that swoops into the lives of the two women and chronicles their unravelling friendship, doesn’t just bring up the body lying in the elevator shaft of Castle Rise, but also exhumes a plethora of other issues including police brutality, abusive relationships, urban planning and forced gentrification, dysfunctional familial bonds, the often-hollow core of social activism…

  Dolan is a fine wordsmith whose lucid prose and compelling voice create an atmosphere of tenseness, of bleakness, of desperation. Both her protagonists, though not completely likeable, have been fleshed out well, as has been their relationship — its genesis and its slow disintegration — a friendship worn thin by lies, deceit and subterfuge.

  However, the deliberate complexity doesn’t always work and I ended up being somewhat flummoxed at places as the novel switched narrators and timelines. I often had to resort to turning back the pages to regain the lost thread — which can be annoying when you are racing to the finish. This is a brilliantly-executed, heart-wrenching novel, I must admit, but I wish the journey had been a little less tedious.

  This Is How It Ends; Eva Dolan, Raven Books, ₹499
  More In

• Crime Friction Lover
  https://crimefictionlover.com/2018/02/this-is-how-it-ends/
  Word count: 950

  QUOTED: "This book can easily sit alongside Highsmith, but what’s more it gives us up-to-date characters, the real London, and an interrogation of issues from the housing crisis to police corruption and on to urban loneliness—all in 4K resolution."

  This Is How It Ends

  February 1, 2018
  Written by crimefictionlover
  Published in iBook, Kindle, Print, Reviews
  1 comment
  Permalink

  Written by Eva Dolan — “Eva Dolan nails it.” There. That’s the review. It’s all you need to know about this book.

  Sorry? What? Yeah, OK, I guess you’re right. I should make more of an effort here. And I will. However, what I said is true. Just buy this book and read it. You might not see another British noir thriller this good for a long time to come.

  So, what is it that Eva Dolan nails? Well, the storytelling, characterisation and above all timing of this book are all… um… totally nailed. This is an author one step ahead of the early adopter crime readers out there, of social issues, of publishers and of her fans. It all starts off like a crime novel should – with a body. He’s lying with a smashed head at Ella’s feet in an abandoned flat by the Thames in some vague part of West London. Soon, Molly is there too and the pair of them are hefting the dead guy into the lift shaft to plummet down a few floors and land with a dull thud.

  Their evil deeds more or less done, we can enjoy the rest of the novel as it unpicks these two feminist antiheroes. Molly is a photographer deeply involved in the protest movement since Greenham Common, where the US Airforce deployed cruise missiles in the 1980s, and where a women’s camp was set up to oppose this. She lives in the block of flats where the body was disposed of and knows Ella, who is much younger, via much more recent protests. They’re both fighting the imminent demolition of the block for redevelopment and Ella has been campaigning on the ground and online to help save the building. She even squats there sometimes. The ruthless developers have bought off all but a handful of the inhabitants, so good luck with that one.

  This Is How It Ends is infused with issues surrounding social justice via these characters, their friends and associates. The big sell-off of London’s social housing is central but everything from zero-hours contracts through to the Miners’ Strike seems to get a mention. The backstory plays out in flashbacks and we see Ella’s rise within the movement as she receives a broken arm when penetrating the police line at a housing demo, becomes a blogger and social media star, and later steps up to direct action, narrowly escaping jail. You might sympathise with their aims, but there’s nothing gentle in the way the author portrays the movement. Their words and actions are captured in full-on raging, vitriolic glory. As are the gnashing riot cops and steamed-up real estate moguls they protect.

  Molly is like a second mother to Ella, who seems dominated by the men in her life. Her father, a high-ranking policeman in Co Durham, wanted her to be a copper but she’s doing the opposite. Her squeeze, Dylan, seems to control her, demanding rendezvous in random hotels and dead jealous of Molly. Her compatriot, Quinn, now hates her after being imprisoned for arson while she beat the rap. Her tormentor, Pearce, is the reason she dropped out of police college and turned her back on Daddy’s dreams. The question is, who’s the dead guy and was it really self-defence?

  You won’t be able to put this book down as the tension builds between Molly and Ella. Almost immediately, Molly realises she’s being kept in the dark about this man, and maybe more. She starts to think they should have called the police in the first place. But the police would love to take down a high-profile troublemaker like Ella. Maybe Ella is just a bit mixed up and the dead man did try to rape her, so he got what was coming to him. The thing is, now Molly feels like she’s getting what’s coming to her. Not even the attention she gets from the building’s caretaker, Callum, can take her mind off it.

  There are so many delectable am-I-wrong-to-think-this? moments here it’s unreal. It’s like the scene in The Talented Mr Ripley when Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character has figured out Dickie’s demise, but you’re actually rooting for Ripley to get away. What secrets these two sisters on the protest line hold, and whose are worse, it is genuinely hard to say. I think you might side with one of them, but I won’t say which.

  Eva Dolan will like that reference to The Talented Mr Ripley because Patricia Highsmith is one of her biggest influences. This book can easily sit alongside Highsmith, but what’s more it gives us up-to-date characters, the real London, and an interrogation of issues from the housing crisis to police corruption and on to urban loneliness – all in 4K resolution.

  So, Eva Dolan nails it.

  Ruinous redevelopment projects also feature in similarly themed The Watcher by Ross Armstrong. Eva Dolan also writes a series of police procedurals set in Peterborough.

  Raven Books
  Print/Kindle/iBook
  £3.47

  CFL Rating: 5 Stars

• Thriller Books Journal
  http://www.thrillerbooksjournal.com/ends-eva-dolan/
  Word count: 1570

  QUOTED: "Dolan packs a dynamite load of surprise twists in the narrative, to the very end. A bitter end indeed, in-keeping with the bleakness of tone which pervades the novel, as is inevitable given the harshness of its underlying themes, but rendered with an abundance of authorial poise that bides well for Dolan’s future efforts, which we’re very much looking forward to."

  This Is How It Ends – Eva Dolan
  Nicola Mira December 13, 2017 New Releases, Reviews 1 Comment

  this-is-how it-ends-dolanEva Dolan is a stand-out in the new breed of British detective novelists for her refreshing take on the police procedural genre in the Zigic and Ferreira series.

  In the three novels published so far, Dolan showed how, even in a setting that is not London, multi-culturalism, gender and social issues can be woven into arresting crime fiction. Her Fenland-based stories, featuring two cops in charge of the Peterborough Hate Crimes department, paint a picture of ‘provincial’ Britain that is a far cry from sleepy suburbia or cosy country squiredom, with the plus of extraordinarily clever, page-turner plots.

  Besides the debut novel, ‘Long Way Home’, my favourite is the most recent, ‘After You Die’ (2016), longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger and shortlisted for the Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year, in which Dolan managed to add new depth to her protagonists – at least to gritty DS Mel Ferreira, a young women of Portuguese origin with enough punch and smarts for two of her male colleagues – and to spin an utterly brilliant whodunnit, leaving the killer’s identity well and truly secret until the very last.

  ‘This Is How It Ends’ is a new departure for Dolan, a stand-alone novel set in London, and right from the first page it’s obvious how she isn’t simply adapting an existing canon. Gone is the classic police procedural structure and, though there is a dead body in the first chapter, this novel is definitely more of a psychological thriller, if one needs to pigeonhole it.

  ‘This Is How It Ends’ is more ambitious than her previous works, in characterisation, plot structure and scope. Dolan works with a material which seems to have more depth, more volume, and she moulds and kneads it expertly, drawing unexpected nuances from it. Always with her signature clarity and sharpness of observation.

  The story opens as young Ella Riordan appeals for help to her friend Molly Fader, both of them at a party organised by Ella to celebrate her latest book project. Molly finds Ella in an empty room, a dead man on the floor. She is dazed, stricken, and first claims she doesn’t know the man and had nothing to do with his violent death. After Molly teases something of an explanation from Ella – the man tried to rape her, she tried to evade, he fell, banged his head, died – they panic and decide to dispose of the body down the building’s unused lift chute.

  One of the reasons they didn’t want to call the police is that both have a record, from their involvement in protest demonstrations turned out other than peaceful, and Ella was recently detained on suspicion of arson – at the premises of a London estate agent that attracted the attention of anti-gentrification activists – though she was later released.

  Ella is heavily involved in the protests, fighting developers who are cajoling and/or coercing owners and tenants out of old London buildings, to renovate them at huge profit. In fact, the party in question was held in one of these buildings, Castle Rise, where Molly lives, to mark the success of a Kickstarter campaign to fund a book Ella is writing off her PhD work, an expose of unsavoury development practices and the political collusion that fosters them.

  Ella and Molly are united by their civic convictions (and hatred of public authorities) but very different in age and background. Ella, in her late twenties, is a spirited Durhamite striving to make her mark as a civil rights activist, while Molly, in her early sixties, is an art teacher turned agitator and photographic chronicler, famously of the Greenham Common 1982 protests but of countless others too, including a recent one in Camden where she took a picture of Ella being clubbed by the police.

  Their relationship is almost mother-daughter, with parental badgering and childish lying thrown in. But it’s also that of two partners in ‘crime’, of two friends, who are close enough to share details about their sex lives, and hide the body of a man who died violently, if presumably accidentally.

  Dolan takes her time building the story, lining up its elements and slotting them into place, and in sketching the two women’s multi-layered relationship. Each scene is a carefully applied brush-stroke, each instance of omission by either Ella or Molly as painstakingly recorded as the respect Ella clearly has for Molly – it is through Molly’s old contacts that Ella is building her reputation as an activist.

  Gradually, we learn of Ella’s wealthy, traditionalist family, her father a retired Police ACC, a man with savvy and clout who’d love to see her follow in his footsteps in the force. There is tension between Ella’s father and his daughter’s egalitarian streak, made worse as she becomes enmeshed, willingly enough actually, with Ryan Quinn, a dangerous agitator well-versed in orchestrating protests and fanning the flames of violence, who led, and was arrested and jailed for, the arson attack in which Ella took part.

  Dolan gives us fully fledged characters and builds them up convincingly, though this inevitably slows down the story’s pace somewhat. The frequent back-and-forth in time, as we learn that Ella went to the Garton police academy, only to leave after being bullied and attacked by a fellow student, asks for a lot of attention on the part of the reader, especially those who may prefer a straightforward murder-investigation-red herrings-denouement kind of story.

  ‘This Is How It Ends’ is very different, in fact it’s in another league, both in plot and narrative terms. Dolan combines first (Molly’s) and third-person (Ella) narrative to skilful effect, paints fully three-dimensional characters out of Ella and Molly and the rest of the convincing cast, and recreates disturbingly well the pain and disruption the Castle Rise tenants go through as they face eviction.

  As Dolan’s previous novels show, she isn’t shy in tackling some of the most disturbing issues of our times, from human trafficking and slave labour to disability and child abuse. In ‘This Is How It Ends’ she raises her game in this respect too, unflinchingly portraying the cultural and organisational shortcomings of the police force, and shooting unforgiving broadsides at unscrupulous metropolitan developers and their political connivers. Her critique is all the more effective as it’s couched in quality writing and balanced insights.

  Above all, ‘This Is How It Ends’ is about exploitation, and not just the economic and social type, though both play major parts in the plot. Using those as a grim backdrop, Dolan zeroes in unerringly on individual, personal exploitation, the kind that lurks just beneath the veneer of every relationship in the novel: Molly and Ella, Ella and her occasional lover Dylan, Molly and her own occasional lover Callum, Ella and the tenants and homeowners she’s campaigning for.

  Even when it’s innocent, almost involuntary, the exploitation of one another’s very human weaknesses is always there, in the small gestures as in the grander ones, all of them narrated by Dolan with a sharpness and directness which are the hallmarks of a remarkable authorial talent.
  The story features other, darker kinds of exploitation, but they are best left for readers to discover, or be surprised by, as Dolan packs a dynamite load of surprise twists in the narrative, to the very end. A bitter end indeed, in-keeping with the bleakness of tone which pervades the novel, as is inevitable given the harshness of its underlying themes, but rendered with an abundance of authorial poise that bides well for Dolan’s future efforts, which we’re very much looking forward to.
  Eva Dolan

  About Nicola Mira
  Nicola Mira is a translator from Italian and French, specialised in journalism and non-fiction texts. Educated in the UK (BA Politics & Economics, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford), he has lived and worked in Italy, France and the UK. He currently lives in Cambridge. He has a Diploma in Translation (Italian to English) from the Chartered Institute of Linguists and is a member of the Society of Authors/Translators Association and English PEN. He translates texts from a range of industries, with fashion journalism his main focus. You can view his fashion translations on FashionNetwork.com. He has contributed to ‘In Other Words’, the journal of the British Centre for Literary Translation, and to London literary magazine Litro, where he also published a translation of an excerpt from Italian early XXth century author Gabriele D’Annunzio. When he is not translating, Nicola loves reading, writing and sports. He is the managing editor of sports statistics website Greatest Sporting Nation.
  View all posts by Nicola Mira →

• Crime Time
  http://www.crimetime.co.uk/ends-eva-dolan-raven-books/
  Word count: 325

  This is How it Ends by Eva Dolan, Raven Books
  Contributor: Ruth Morse

  Jan 12, 2018
  Eva Dolan’s fifth book is a departure from her Peterborough-set ‘Hate Crimes’ series and a change in style from third-person narration in more or less chronological sequence to the voices of a pair of narrators in flashbacks as well as more recent moments. This new book, a standalone, is hard work, not least because both of the women we listen to have so many drawbacks. They are both political activists, the older of whom is a professional photographer whose experiences reach as far as Greenham Common’s Women’s Peace Camp in the early 1980s. The younger one, currently writing—or, perhaps rather—not-writing her Ph.D., shares a commitment to stopping London’s demolition of housing for the poor to make way for luxury flats. Since the novel comes hard on Grenfell Tower and contiguous lower-rise housing, it could hardly be more of its moment. Dolan’s work has previously been published by Harvill Secker, by Vintage, and she now follows her editor to Bloomsbury’s new literary crime fiction imprint, Raven Books. I emphasize this because Dolan has written exceptionally well on social issues, and this remains a strenuous characteristic of her work. This is How it Ends is intended to be more ambitious than her previous style, more in tune with psychological suspense plots. It’s by way of being one of those complex novels which require the reader to keep track of a number of things: events, participants, other characters, bodies, when they happened, and starting from not figuring out the title. Since it is both stimulating and taxing, and since the challenge in such novels is precisely the reader’s willingness to work at what may or may not be hints, clues, or confusions, I’ll stop here, except to say that the ending is worth the struggle. Just.

• The Big Issue
  https://www.bigissue.com/culture/books/gravesend-william-boyle-ends-eva-dolan/
  Word count: 249

  QUOTED: "The key to Dolan’s compulsive storytelling is that her action is rooted in utterly believable characters. ... This is terrific writing."

  Equally inventive and compelling is Eva Dolan’s This Is How It Ends. Dolan has previously written a handful of sharp detective novels based around the Hate Crimes Unit, books that blended literary style with cutting edge-topicality and social commentary. This new standalone psychological thriller shows the same mix thrown into an impeccably structured story that blends the personal and political with searing effect. The story is split between seasoned left-wing campaigner Molly and young political blogger Ella. It starts with a body in the lift shaft of a nearly abandoned tower block in London and unravels in various directions, with expectations about blame, guilt and motive constantly shifting under the reader’s feet.
  This Is How It Ends, Eva Dolan – Raven, £3.99

  The key to Dolan’s compulsive storytelling is that her action is rooted in utterly believable characters. Molly is a veteran of Greenham Common and has spent a lifetime fighting for her beliefs, while Ella, similarly driven, is a product of the new millennium, more pragmatic and focused. The women have a kind of surrogate mother-daughter relationship, one with all the intricacies and conflict that such a relationship suggests, and it’s that shifting dynamic that keeps the story driving forward, and keeps readers on their toes. This is terrific writing that engages the head and heart equally.

• Criminal Element
  https://www.criminalelement.com/review-this-is-how-it-ends-by-eva-dolan/
  Word count: 1484

  QUOTED: "It is a masterful thriller that slowly ramps up the tension and keeps the needle pinned until the very last page."
  "Dolan plays no tricks on us. The “twists,” as they are, are all well-earned and play out naturally without gimmicks or formulae."

  Review: This is How it Ends by Eva Dolan
  By Crime HQ
  March 13, 2018

  This is How it Ends by Eva Dolan is a standalone psychological thriller that examines friendship, suspicion, and betrayal (available March 13, 2018).

  Best known for her Zigic and Ferreira crime series, This is How it Ends is Eva Dolan’s first standalone thriller, and after reading it, there is no doubt that her career is in zero danger of ending anytime soon.

  Disclaimer: I have been an online friend of Eva Dolan’s since I began writing crime fiction in 2010. I haven’t read her series, but I am a fan of her short fiction, and I was eager to read this book. So I had very high hopes for it. You know, the kind of hopes that are often dashed when a book doesn’t meet your expectations?

  Well, no worries here. The book exceeded my every expectation. It is a masterful thriller that slowly ramps up the tension and keeps the needle pinned until the very last page.

  Set in the ever-more-gentrified London, she wastes no time in introducing the story: Ella, a young, anti-gentrification activist, calls for help from Molly, an old leftist with a sharp tongue and sharper mind, because she is in serious trouble. They are at a party to benefit the tenants of a mostly-abandoned apartment tower slated for demolition—if the few remaining occupants can be lured into taking payoffs or forced to leave. In one of the abandoned flats, we find Ella with the body of a young man.

  It was an accident.

  Except neither Molly or Ella can face a police investigation. Whether it was an accident or not, they must make it look like one. And when the police find the body, their world begins to implode like a sturdy old building about to be destroyed to make way for the voracious gods of urban progress.

  The book alternates between Ella and Molly. Molly is an elder woman who lives in the doomed tower, an activist who cut her teeth at the Greenham Woman’s Peace Camp and became a famous photographer but never sold out. She takes Ella under her wing and wants to guide her from making the same mistakes she did, to help her be the next wave of activism in the post-Thatcher era where profit is its own end and anyone in its way is grass for the thresher. And Ella needs her help. She’s in trouble, with a dead body at her feet and a control-freak lover named Dylan, whom she can’t say no to.

  The characters are well-drawn, and Molly’s melancholy helplessness in the face of the London juggernaut doesn’t descend into dreariness because she’s smart, funny, and refuses to act her post-retirement age. She has Callum, a younger former soldier who joins her to watch TV and “chill” in her place, and his mysteriousness draws us in. We know he’s not a suspect; Dolan keeps us entertained with other mysteries of motivation and whether people are who they profess to be.

  Molly doesn’t hate the new, rich, young people who are taking over her neighborhood, which makes her easier to sympathize with:

  From my spot, tucked back under the shadow of the balcony, I can see into the new tower. At night it seems more glass than not, long expanses of it exposing sleek black kitchens and living rooms with huge sofas and factory-painted abstract expressionism, bedrooms too pristine for anyone to ever fuck in. They are shrines to pressed white shirts and red-soled shoes and the greedily acquired symbols of urban affluence bought by people who probably grew up like me. Out in satellite towns dreaming of different versions of themselves, dressing them up like dolls, mentally testing them out in new stage sets.

  I wonder how the reality is holding up. I should feel hatred towards them, I suppose, but I can’t. I see the hours they work and how their heads hang as they strip off their suits in the burnished light of the bedrooms before they trudge towards their rainforest showers. I know they’re killing themselves for that eight hundred square feet of high-spec living.

  They would reject my pity but they have it all the same.

  The flashback chapters with Ella are just as compelling; she seems easily led and dependent on medication, but she has a way of bringing people together, organizing them, and like all good heroes, she emboldens great enemies. Hers is a stalker who calls her a fraud and is intent on exposing her. We soon learn that her background isn’t what we’d expect from an activist who specializes in civil disobedience and flouting laws she considers immoral. Her father is police.

  Dolan knows people and writes them exceedingly well. This is Molly, angry:

  She sounds so sure of herself. Her voice becoming clipped and prim, how I imagine her mother talks when she’s sending back something in a restaurant or telling the cleaner than her work isn’t up to par and she’ll have to do it again before she can go home.

  It’s difficult to choose the best excerpts from Ella’s story without revealing too much, but this wouldn’t be much of a thriller if she wasn’t interrogated by the police at some point, so here is a favorite scene:

  Without a solicitor she could claim coercion later. Or worse.

  She wouldn’t do that. Her escape route was nothing so common as playing the victim, but she felt sure she wouldn’t need it. Not this time, anyway. This was a fishing expedition and if she stayed cool, stayed composed, then she would learn more from them than they would learn from her.

  Because the problem with detectives, especially the ones like Wazir who had probably been underestimated her whole life, was the desperate need to display the intelligence people doubted they had. Show them disrespect, scratch that raw nerve, and they would overwhelm you with the evidence of their superiority.

  Another life lesson from her dad and Ella doubted he ever thought she’d use it in this context. It had been advice to help her climb the greasy pole once she was on the graduate fast track. He’d wanted her to understand how the officers above her worked so she could ultimately take their jobs. He had a Machiavellian streak that he’d tried to pass onto her and not much of it had stuck, but she was grateful for moments like this when she could summon his steady voice in her head and have him talk her through an awkward situation.

  As the noose grows tighter, we don’t know who to believe. Unreliable narrators have become popular again since Gone Girl, and when done well, they can make the most memorable of thrillers. I won’t reveal much more here, but Dolan plays no tricks on us. The “twists,” as they are, are all well-earned and play out naturally without gimmicks or formulae. I was both entertained as a reader and a writer, admiring the skill required to spin a yarn that evokes historic events—like the miner’s strikes and nuclear disarmament protests—along with the modern tragedies such as the Grenfell Towers fire, relies on character to guide the story, and keeps it compelling for 300 pages.

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  Thomas Pluck has slung hash, worked on the docks, trained in martial arts in Japan, and even swept the Guggenheim museum (but not as part of a clever heist). He hails from Nutley, New Jersey, home to criminal masterminds Martha Stewart and Richard Blake, but has so far evaded capture. He is the author of Bad Boy Boogie, his first Jay Desmarteaux crime thriller, and Blade of Dishonor, an action adventure which BookPeople called “the Raiders of the Lost Ark of pulp paperbacks.”

  Joyce Carol Oates calls him “a lovely kitty man.”
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