Book Review: Trust Her by Flynn Berry

Thrillers set in Ireland hold an irresistible allure for me, because of my heritage. My great-grandmother (on my mother’s side) emigrated from Belfast to Ellis Island, NY, in her teens. She joined her older brother in New York after her mother died and her father remarried. Decades earlier my father’s forebears left southern Ireland for Montreal, Canada. Protestant on one side, Catholic on the other, but all unmistakably Irish. It is any wonder that stories concerning The Troubles draw me in? As a country, Ireland is about the size of Indiana, with a population of around five million people, like Colorado. Which is to say, it’s hard to create a new identity on an island that small.

Two sisters, Marian and Tessa Daly, relocated to the South from Northern Ireland after they informed on the IRA. They escaped being assassinated for that crime and started new lives in Dublin. Tessa edits copy at the Irish Observer but the focus of her life is her little son Finn. Berry doesn’t minimize the wrenching difficulty of creating a new existence. Tessa remembers, “when we left the North, we tore our lives apart, starting over with nothing. Not one friend, not one plan.” It’s the little things, the intimacy of friendship, that Tessa misses.

I’ve new friends here, but they’re not my mates, not yet. Mates piss in front of you. I remember my old mate Clodagh dropping onto a toilet in a pub stall without even breaking conversation. None of my new friends would do that, not yet. Sometimes the thought turns me grief-stricken, that I might never again have the sort of friend who will reach over and take a sip of my drink without asking first.

And I miss my old job at the BBC, and the high-wire act of producing a radio show live on air. I was good at it, too, really good at it.

New lives, new names, no chance of being discovered, right? No. Eion Royce, their IRA handler, a man who “grew up on our estate in Andersonstown,” in west Belfast, pulls them back in. Their assignment is diabolical: “Tessa is told she must track down her old handler from MI5, Eamonn, and attempt to turn him into an IRA informant, or lose everything.” Marian’s task is to visit Niall, a former comrade, in jail in Northern Ireland. 

Once a tout (in Northern Ireland a tout is an informant), always a tout as far as Royce is concerned. His instructions to Tessa verge on insulting. Maturity helps Tessa hold her own while Royce blatantly attempts to manage her emotions and reactions: “This conversation would have wrecked my head when I was twenty, but luckily for me I’m thirty-six and the only reaction I can muster is an eye roll.” 

Going back in is brutal on the sisters—Marian hated seeing Niall in prison, as she tells Tessa.

“It was awful,” she says. “He screamed at me the whole time.” She describes the visit, then says, “This isn’t going to work. He won’t agree to see me again.”

“Yes he will,” I say. “What he did yesterday sounds like one of Finn’s tantrums.”

“So?”

“Finn has never once had a tantrum at school, most kids don’t. They only have tantrums with people they trust,” I say. “If Niall’s having a tantrum, he wants you to hear him.”

The story spirals downwards. The sisters discover that their mother helped the IRA. Tessa’s ex considers whether he’d make the better custodial parent because of Tessa’s precarious position. Tessa is attracted to Eamonn, and she sublimates her emotions by going wild swimming. Her dreams are fevered as she tries to find a way out of their hateful assignment. Can she bribe Royce to leave her and Marian alone? One morning Marian goes hiking at Glendalough, solo. She asks Tessa to mind her baby Saoirse. Marian’s still nursing but she leaves Tessa well supplied with milk.  When Marian doesn’t come home on time, Tessa asks the Gardaí to search for her sister. She’s worried there’s been foul play. As the hours pass, Tessa loses her composure and reveals that Marian was once in the IRA. 

Reading Trust Her is difficult. It’s riveting, scary, horrifying. You put down the book, unable to read another word, and then pick it up again almost instantly. Berry is a past-master at ratcheting up tension.  

Criminal Element reviewed Berry’s first novel, Under the Harrow, describing it as “a riveting psychological thriller and a haunting exploration of the fierce love between two sisters, the distortions of grief, and the terrifying power of the past.” Trust Her is firmly in that lane—the lives of two sisters, consumed by “the terrifying power of the past.” N.B. Under the Harrow won the Edgar Award for best first novel in 2016.