“She was used to being wild Molly, exasperating Molly, cheeky Molly, but still after all these years she hadn’t found the words to be sad Molly. She would have felt more comfortable calling her family to say she’d been arrested than that she was lonely.”

There’s Been A Little Incident is the first novel by Irish author Alice Ryan. When Molly Black’s Uncle John gathers the family together, some think it’s a bit premature. Molly has disappeared before, often requiring a dramatic extraction, and maybe she just wants to escape for a while. If so, who could blame her?

Crammed into John’s suburban Dublin house, in person or by Zoom, are Molly’s four uncles, her four aunts (not necessarily spouses of said uncles), her granny (mother of five of those present) and four cousins. John reports that B., Molly’s best friend since they were four, was left a note that “didn’t say where she was going, just that she loved us, but she had to run”.

When John stresses the urgency to find her, several remind him of earlier false alarms, but he is insistent, and assigns them tasks. While Molly has always been impulsive, B. is inclined to believe that his decision to move in with his new boyfriend has precipitated this. And he’d be right: fatherless since she was nine, motherless at nineteen, without B. as her constant companion, she feels there’s no one to whom she now belongs.

As the family searches for clues to her destination, some at first believing the whole exercise to be unnecessary, irritating and inconvenient, they begin to recall what Molly has been in their lives. “Molly had a special connection to each of us” For John, “it seemed like Molly was the daughter he’d never had” and “Molly Black was like electricity – sometimes she lit up the world. Sometimes she electrocuted you.”

They remember how Molly had tried to talk to each of them over the last few weeks, but they didn’t spare her the time, so now they feel a little guilty about that. They also remember just how much Annabelle, of whom Molly reminds them so much, did for them when she was still alive.

Thinking back, they realise that, actually, they have always needed Molly just as much as she has needed them. Even if some of them think she is more a contagious mess than a lovable rogue to be humoured, they agree that Molly has to be found.

The Black family aren’t the only ones who want to know where Molly is: the Guards want to ask her what she might have seen when she was near where a young nurse, now missing, was last seen alive.

So when they get word, they put together an extraction team “of nothing but liabilities. The line-up was an irate aunt with a broken ankle, a vacuous vlogger who Bobby had actively avoided for twenty years, a heavily sedated uncle on the verge of a pro-terrorism diatribe, a nervous wreck who could only grasp concepts which existed as functions in Excel, and at the last minute –and the absolute pièce de résistance –they’d had to replace Mike, the one reliable member of the team, with a long-term alcoholic.”

Ryan’s cast of characters is a crazy family, made up of “new-aged hippies, religious nuts, alcoholics, former shoe salesmen, delinquent youths and Sudoku enthusiasts” who manage to endear themselves to the reader. Are they “nosy, judgemental and eccentric but ultimately great”? or “suffocating, overbearing people who pigeon-holed you”? Either way, quite a few of them are dealing with grief. And doing it the best way they can.

Ryan gives them wise words and insightful observations: “People who give out that much good energy, who are breezy and jovial and try their best to be happy and positive all the time, have a far greater capacity for getting hurt than those who put up a defence.” She often has a marvellous turn of phrase: “Mike called them the Botox Bettys. But Liam said they were more like the Schadenfreude Sheilas”. Funny, heart-warming and uplifting, this is a brilliant debut novel.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Head of Zeus Apollo