Kala by Colin Walsh

Read: March 2025
Format: Kindle

I’ve found a new subgenre – Literary Thriller! – I hadn’t considered it could be A Thing, but it is very much up my street!

The story takes place in dual timelines as present-day developments cause characters to reflect on their memories of their friend, the titular Katherine ‘Kala’ Lanann, and the events that led up to her disappearance fifteen years ago.

This book is a hybrid of literary fiction and mystery thriller, and I really enjoyed this mix. The literary fiction side gave me character depth and development, meditations on youth, friendship and the passage of time. The mystery side gave me a whodunnit to solve! I also really enjoyed the small-town Irish setting and their turns of phrase.

The main POV characters were each distinct and made for an interesting balance of personalities.

We have Joe Brennan, once the Golden Boy in school and Kala’s boyfriend, who is now a famous musician. He’s returned home to run a local bar and is struggling with alcoholism. At first, I thought he was a little bland as the handsome lad, good at everything with the nice parents, and now worshipped by fans and a bit of a clueless prick, but in the end I found the way the book slowly unravelled him and his relationships to be one of my favourite parts.

Helen was the new girl in town, struggling with her mentally ill mother’s death and her father’s alcoholism. She was lonely until she met Kala and her friend Aoife. Helen, always fiercely intelligent, curious and strong-willed, is now a free land journalist in Québec and is very reluctantly back in Kinlough for the first time in years, for her father’s wedding. She is kind of a dick too, but in a different way to Joe, and I liked that the two of them never got along!

Mush is easily the most likeable. After an accident scarred his face he never left Kinlough, still lives with his mother and works in her Café. As a sensitive dreamer with high emotional intelligence, Mush was the glue that held the group together. He could mess about with the lads, but also have sleepovers with the girls and genuinely enjoy their company (and he’s not gay!).

I found the teenage group dynamics to be well written and with all six members of their little gang being clear individuals, and each having different relationships with each other. Friendship is tricky and especially painful when you’re fifteen, and the mix of love, anxiety and jealousy felt real. At the centre of this, Kala herself makes for an interesting and tragic character. Joe, Helen and Aoife all love her to the point of an idolisation that is impossible for a person to live up to. At a certain point they couldn’t see her as a person beyond how she makes them feel, what they want her to be.

They remind me of Mam’s notebooks, and what she wrote about how everything always happens in the present, but the present can echo forwards and backwards in time to itself. 

The narrative switches POVs between characters and different points in time as events in the present day jog memories from the past. Time as a constant echo is a strong theme, and there is a subtle recurring motif where they see people in the street who fit the description of their past or future selves, which I thought was interesting. At first it did confuse me a bit, though, and I wondered if we were going to get into magical realism territory!

A glass smashes and I see a girl run from a terrace outside a bar, a bouncer shouting after her. The girl runs further down Fox Street where she’s joined by two other girls and a curly-haired boy and they dart through the crowds up ahead, where Joe is swigging from a bottle of champagne, getting his photo taken by strangers.

I will say, if you’re looking for a pure mystery thriller then Kala is not it. It spends more time on building characters than moving the plot along. I don’t think the present-day missing girls plot kicks in until almost halfway through, and even then, it moves fairly slowly until the final act, which then ends up feeling like a rushed conclusion.

I also picked out the real villain pretty early on. I think the way they were woven in was good, I just know what to look for in a plot! I did find the twists and turns satisfying. ⚠️ There is some extreme violence and very upsetting animal cruelty on the page, plus historical child abuse in the plot, so be aware if you’re sensitive to that.

The book ends extremely abruptly, too! Normally, I don’t mind that, but I don’t think it worked here. As I said, the conclusion to the main plot ended up rushed with some very heavy revelations and there had been 400 pages of emotional tension built as well, I needed a bit more resolution. I wanted to know what everything that had just happened meant for Helen, Mush and Joe’s relationship to each other and their memories of Kala.

I loved this, though. I need more Literary Thrillers in my reading pile, and I’d be interested to read more from Colin Walsh, apparently, Kala was his debut.