Review of There’s Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly by Adrian McKinty (Serpent’s Tail, 2017)

Belfast 1988.  A recent returnee to Northern Ireland, a local drug-dealer, is found dead.  He’s been shot with a bolt from a crossbow in front of the house he shared with his Bulgarian wife.  Detective Sean Duffy returns from a holiday in Donegal to investigate. A few days earlier another man survived a similar attack. It seems as if local paramilitaries are actively policing drug-dealing in their area. Duffy keeps scratching at the case despite being directed to ‘yellow file’ it. Eventually his persistence starts to pay dividends, but it also brings a visit from Internal Affairs and attracts the attention of the IRA. If IA doesn’t push him out of the force, then the IRA might push him out of existence. To add spice to a difficult case, his partner has decided to seek a temporary break in their relationship, taking their young daughter with her. Duffy is not easily phased, but the stakes at work and home have got him worried.

There’s Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly is the sixth book in Adrian McKinty’s excellent Sean Duffy series set in Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland during the 1980s. In this outing, Duffy has settled down with his partner and has mellowed a little after the birth of their daughter. His work life is just as difficult as ever. Being a Catholic cop and head of Carrickfergus CID at the height of the Troubles is challenging; more so when you have a streak of intransigence and bloody-mindedness and want to solve every crime and have the wits to do so. In this case, Duffy seeks the killer of a local drug-dealer which brings him into the orbit of paramilitaries who ‘police’ local areas. As usual he manages to rub his own colleagues and powerful people up the wrong way, with potentially deadly consequences.  As with the other books, the characterisation, sense of place and time, intertextuality, and prose are excellent.  Duffy and his colleagues are three-dimensional characters and the dialogue throughout the story sparkles.  In addition, the pacing and plotting is very nicely done, with tale working its way to a tense denouement without the need for obvious plot devices.  The result is a wonderful addition to the series.

Review of Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty (Serpent's Tail, 2016)

1987, Northern Ireland.  Detective Inspector Sean Duffy of Carrickfergus CID is experiencing the high and lows of being a member of the RUC – riot duty for Muhammad Ali’s visit to Belfast, Beth his student girlfriend leaving him, and investigating the supposed theft of a wallet from a Finnish delegation visiting to assess the area for a new factory.  Then a young English journalist who was accompanying the Finns is found dead in the grounds of Carrickfergus castle.  It seems like a suicide but some evidence suggests otherwise.  If it is murder, then Duffy has a perplexing locked-room mystery, the second of his career – and the odds against that are astronomical.  On the same night a chief inspector who had been involved in the Finns' trip dies in a car bomb.  Duffy and his colleagues doggedly pursue the locked-room case which points to organized sexual abuse at the highest levels by politicians and television stars but find it difficult to make progress.

Two years since Sean Duffy’s last outing in Gun Street Girl and he’s still a somewhat listless detective inspector in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland.  In this fifth instalment in the series Duffy’s love life once again flounders and he’s presented with an intriguing locked-room mystery.  At the heart of the case is sex abuse ring linked to Jimmy Saville and others, which Duffy finds difficult to investigate.  There’s no doubt that McKinty has created a superior police procedural series.  As with the previous four books, Rain Dogs presses all the right buttons – an engaging flawed lead character, a strong sense of place and time, nice contextualisation, and a thoughtful, clever plot with an interesting puzzle.  And, as usual, it’s written in his distinctive prose and laced with dark humour.  The story is a little flat in the middle at times and it would have been fascinating for the Saville angle to be explored a bit more, but nonetheless the tale is another strong addition to this excellent series. 

Review of Gun Street Girl by Adrian McKinty (Serpent's Tail, 2015)

Belfast, 1985, and Detective Inspector Sean Duffy of Carrickfergus CID seems to be spending more time maning riot lines than investigating cases.  Teetering on the edge of burnout he backs his sergeant in a dispute over the jurisdiction of a double murder of a rich bookmaker and his wife.  Solving it will aid McCrabban’s career prospects and it seems like an open and shut case, especially after the son commits suicide leaving a confession note.  Duffy, however, is not convinced, especially when he discovers that Michael Kelly dropped out of Oxford after attending a party where a cabinet minister’s daughter died of a heroin overdose, and Kelly’s best friend has just been sacked from Shorts factory, where six missiles have gone missing.  Then there’s another murder, followed by political pressure to drop the case.  Ever dogged, Duffy and his team stick to their task, determined to discover the truth.

Gun Street Girl is the fourth book in Sean Duffy series set in Northern Ireland in the 1980s.  Duffy is an appealing character, a perennially out of place Northern Irish cop blessed with mordant wit and a self-destructive streak.  Add to this McKinty’s ability to conjure up the sense of time and place and to thread his stories through the real scandals of the period (which given its politics and conflicts, Northern Ireland has in abundance) and you have a very attractive mix.  The wider context in Gun Street Girl is the disappearance of six Javelin missiles from Shorts Factory in East Belfast.  Narrow margins a theme that runs through the book.  At the start, Sean Duffy’s sergeant takes on a murder case as it just about falls into their jurisdiction and Duffy is teetering on the edge of burnout and leaving the RUC, and the book closes with a very nicely judged pair of close shaves.  It was always going to be difficult to top Duffy’s last outing, In the Morning I’ll be Gone (my book of 2014), given its clever story within a story, and whilst Gun Street Girl is an engaging read it lacked the same edge, tension and political intrigue that ran throughout its predecessor.  It is nonetheless, a very decent police procedural that really sparks to life in the final couple of chapters as it nears its double denouement, both of them with a nice bitter twist.  As usual, McKinty’s unique prose style shines throughout.  It’ll be very interesting to see where McKinty takes Duffy next in what is an excellent series.

As an afternote, I wish Serpent's Tail would stop using the Ian Rankin quote of 'An exciting new voice' on the covers of McKinty's books.  Yes, an exciting voice, but he's well into double figures at this stage, is pretty well established, and is far beyond 'new'.

Review of The Sun is God by Adrian McKinty (2014, Serpent’s Tail)

After a traumatic incident at the end of the Boar War, military policeman Will Prior orchestrates his dismissal from the British army. Not wanting to return home to Yorkshire he instead heads to German New Guinea in the South Pacific. There he tries to forget his past, eking out a living by managing a small plantation and conducting an affair with his native housekeeper, Siwa. When the autopsy of a German national, who’d been living on a remote island populated by a strange cult, suggests foul play, the authorities turn to Will for professional help. Reluctantly Will agrees to accompany a representative of the Governor and an English traveller, Bessie Pullen-Burry, who is writing a travelogue, to the island to investigate the death. There they are greeted by the small group of Cocovores who believe they have discovered the secret of eternal life - naturism, the worship of the sun, and a strict diet of coconuts, bananas and heroin. Over several drug-addled and malaria-ridden days, Will tries to discover whether any of the dozen inhabitants had murdered one of their number and as he nears his conclusion he starts to fear that he might not leave the island alive.

The Sun is God is based on the true story of the suspicious death of a member of a strange cult on a small island, Kabakon, in German New Guinea in 1906. Rejecting modern life, the Cocovores believed that they could achieve immortality through sun worship and a strict diet of coconuts and bananas (fruit that grows at the top of trees, nearest to the sun). Whilst most of the case are based on real characters, McKinty sends a fictional, ex-military policeman, Will Prior, to the island to investigate the case. Prior is a veteran of the Boer War, still suffering from post-traumatic stress from the conflict, and a reluctant policeman who’s prone to leap to conclusions and stumble his way through an investigation. The tight knit nature of the small community, their addiction to industrial heroin, and the surfacing of Prior’s malaria fever doesn’t help matters. The strength of the story is the oddity of the case itself, the mix of nicely penned characters, and the dynamic of the religious cult. However, background information on the history of the cult and the suspicious death is a little thin. Curiously for a McKinty book, the telling was slightly detached, almost as if he was mimicking an Edwardian voice, and it’s not until the last few pages when the narrative shifts focus and tense that his usual style kicks in, providing a climax to what had been a rather terse and reserved narrative. Overall an interesting and thoughtful historical crime tale.

Dealing with time

I always think the sign of a good writer is how they deal with time in a story, especially a transition across a number of weeks and months that isn’t just a jump from one point in time to another.  At one point In the Morning I’ll Be Gone Adrian McKinty does a really nice job in moving the story forward by several weeks, whilst also letting the reader know what happened during that time, but only taking a couple of paragraphs to do so.  He does so by blending little snippets about the main character and key historical events in a quite matter of fact way.  Reading it was one of those moments where I felt myself learning a useful tip about how to structure a story and deal with temporal shifts.  I’m going to have a play with using the technique in one of my own stories.  I suspect it’s a bit more tricky to pull off than it at first seems, with the danger being the narrative potentially seeming like just a listing of time-sequenced events.

Review of In the Morning I’ll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty (Serpent’s Tail, 2014)

1983, Sean Duffy is a Catholic cop in the Royal Ulster Constabulary.  With a record of badly judged misdemeanours and demoted out of CID, Duffy is soon drummed out of the force.  Salvation, however, comes from an unlikely source - British intelligence.  The Maze prison breakout has resulted in several high profile IRA members being on the loose.  One them is master bomb-maker, Dermot McCann, with whom Duffy attended school.  McCann was last spotted in Libya, but has now disappeared and is feared to be preparing a major bombing campaign.  In return for reinstatement to his old rank and post, MI5 want Duffy to locate his former friend.  He finds an unlikely ally in McCann’s former mother-in-law, who’ll use her Republican networks to help, but only if he’ll solve the death of her daughter.  The problem is that Lizzie died in the family pub which was locked and bolted from the inside and all the evidence points to an accident rather than the murder her mother suspects.  Duffy harbours the same suspicions, but can find no compelling evidence to support them and it’s only a matter of time until McCann resurfaces.

In the Morning I’ll Be Gone is the third book in the Duffy trilogy.  It can be read as a standalone, but I’d recommend reading the earlier two instalments in this excellent series.  In my view this is McKinty’s strongest book of the one's I've read).  It hits all the bases - strong voice and prose; very good sense of place and history that interweaves real events and people; nice characterisation and interplay between characters; and a well worked plot.  What sets this apart from his previous work is the latter.  McKinty has always been a good plotter, but in In The Morning I’ll be Gone he entwines two compelling stories to great effect.  At one level the tale is a straightforward thriller - Duffy is running against the clock to try and track down an IRA master bomb-maker, Dermot McCann.  The twist is that McKinty inserts a cold case locked room mystery into the heart of the novel, one that reconnects him with a family from his past.  Duffy thus ends up undertaking a traditional police procedural investigation that involves patient detection framed within a wider case that demands more urgency.  Both cases are very well told and enfolded, leading to a clever and interesting climax.  It takes a skilled writer to convincingly insert a character into real history and McKinty pulls it off with aplomb.  An excellent conclusion to the trilogy and highly recommended.

Lazy Sunday Service

Yesterday I finally got round to making a start on In the Morning I'll Be Gone, the third book in Adrian McKinty's Sean Duffy trilogy.  I bought the book the week it was released back in January then promptly misplaced it.  I was starting to think that I might need to buy another copy when I unearthed it looking for something else.  It promptly scooted to the top of the to-be-read pile and I zipped through the first few chapters, which are excellent.  Hopefully the rest of the book continues in the same vein.  I'll post a review in the next couple of weeks.  Other reviews to be posted in the next few days include Mel Healy's Another Case in Cowtown, Pat Fitzpatrick's Stay Away From Those Ferraris, and Sulari Gentill's A Decline in Prophets.

My posts this week
Review of Salt River by James Sallis
Review of Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis
Construction 2020 Strategy for Ireland
Reading books about crime fiction
The long drop

Review of I Hear Sirens in the Street by Adrian McKinty (Serpent’s Tail, 2013)

It’s April 1982 in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland.  The hunger strikes only formally ended a few months previously, the assembly lines of DeLorean Motor Company are operating in North Belfast, and Argentina has just invaded the Falklands.  Detective Inspector Sean Duffy and his sergeant discover a headless, cut up body in a suitcase, dumped at an abandoned factory.  The age of the victim and a distinctive tattoo suggest he was an American veteran of the Second World War.  They’ve few other clues to go on and the US authorities and special branch aren’t being helpful.  Regardless, Duffy and his colleagues push on with the case making a little headway before hitting a brick wall.  Just as it’s about to become a cold case they’re given a cryptic clue.  Despite warnings not to proceed, Duffy pushes on determined to solve the murder regardless of the consequences.

I Hear Sirens in the Street is the second book in the Sean Duffy trilogy.  The first, The Cold, Cold Ground was one of my best reads of 2012.  This book has many of the same qualities - good historical contextualisation and intertextuality, politically and socially; well-penned, credible characters; a good balance between on and off-duty storylines; and strong sense of place.  In particular, the interaction between characters is very good and some of the dialogue sparkles, the prose is often wonderful, and Duffy is a compelling lead character - complex and flawed yet likeable.  Where the story is a little weak at times is with respect to pace and plot.  For the most part the story flies along, but in the middle section the pace slackens and the narrative felt a little slow and padded.  With respect to plot, there were a few elements of questionable credibility or acted as obvious plot devices.  They served the story and made for a dramatic climax to the book but nevertheless jarred a little.  Overall, I Hear Sirens in the Street is a compelling and entertaining read and I’m very much looking forward to reading the final instalment in the trilogy.

Review of The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty (Serpent’s Tail, 2012)

Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy is a Catholic cop in Northern Ireland in 1981 in a force dominated by protestants and targeted by paramilitary republicans. A few weeks after being posted to the CID in Carrickfergus, the Maze hunger strikers start to die, the whole province erupting into violent protest. Between having to don riot gear to help his beleaguered colleagues, Duffy has two new cases to investigate - the death of a homosexual man, his hand severed, and the apparent suicide of an ex-wife of a Maze hunger striker. This is quickly added to by the murder of a second known homosexual man. It seems that Duffy might be investigating the first known serial killer on the island, one that is taking advantage of the limited police resources. As Duffy works away at the case he has to negotiate the complex terrain of IRA, loyal paramilitaries and the security forces, none of whom prove cooperative. Duffy though has the bit between his teeth and is unwilling to let the case slide into the unsolved pile.

As an Irish police procedural, The Cold, Cold Ground is right up there with Brian McGilloway’s Inspector Devlin and John Brady’s Matt Minogue series. In fact, it might just be the best example of a police procedural so far produced on the island. It’s pretty difficult to pick holes in any aspect of the story, with perhaps the exception of forgetting to return a submachine gun left on the hall table back to the barracks for two whole weeks (not the kind of item that would escape one’s attention). McKinty immerses the reader in Carrickfergus and Belfast in 1981 - its politics, its riots, its policing, its fashions, music and social relations, its sense of place, without it ever swamping the narrative. The attention to detail is excellent. Sean Duffy is a complex, flawed and bright lead character, out of his depth and desperately trying to stay afloat amongst paramilitary groups and police and security service politics, and determined to solve the two cases. He’s surrounded by a well realised support cast, some of whom are real figures, other fictional characters. The plot twists and turns and is nicelyy paced, and McKinty shows his usual flair for poetic prose. A great read from an author who consistently turns out interesting and insightful books. The only let down - I have to wait for the next Duffy book to be published.

Review of Falling Glass by Adrian McKinty (Serpent’s Tail, 2011)

Rachel Coulter, an ex-drug addict, has fled with her two young children. Her ex-husband, Richard Coulter, the multi-millionaire owner of Northern Ireland’s low-cost airline, wants them found and he’s willing to pay a handsome fee. Coulter has turned to fixer Michael Forsythe who recommends Killian, a Pavee Traveller, who specialises in finding people and fixing problems. Having retired and sunk his nest egg into the Northern Ireland property market that has since crashed, Killian is persuaded to take on the case. He soon has Rachel in his sights, but it seems that she has taken more than the children, something that is likely to turn Killian against his employers. And so a second hunter, a former Russian soldier, is sent to edge Killian out of the picture and retrieve the daughters. Thus a deadly cat and mouse chase ensues.

The real strength of an Adrian McKinty book is the quality of the writing. His prose and dialogue are excellent and the stories are well told. Falling Glass is a straight thriller, with a relatively uncomplicated plot lacking in major twists or turns, and a small group of core characters. Killian, Rachel, Coulter and Markov are all interesting characters, but for me they were lacking a little in depth. In contrast, the two young daughters were more ‘alive’ and resonant. The start is excellent and the story is engaging, with some very good scenes in places, but I had difficulty believing both the first escape scene and the final confrontations. Whilst the story is entertaining, to this reader it was not quite as good as his other books I’ve read. I guess this is the problem if you set the bar so damn high. Still good stuff mind, just not quite flying at the same altitude as Dead I May Well Be or Fifty Grand. Overall, a straight up and down thriller, with some very nice prose, that’s an entertaining read.

Lazy Sunday Service

The nice people at Serpent's Tail have sent me an ARC of Falling Glass by Adrian McKinty, which is released early March. I've only read the prologue so far, but it's a great start. The scene is an Irish man in a so-called Irish bar in New York giving out about the shoddy, hyperreal nature of the bar. The dialogue is spot-on.

"My point, friend, is that this is not an affectionate homage. This is not an interior critique. This is not Jay-Z using, what I advisedly call, the N-word. This is a collection of cliches that actually undermines what it is supposed to be celebrating. This whole ethos is a paradigm in need of shifting. And the fact that is generated by people, no offence, with only a tangential connection to the ur-source of that culture makes it all the more embarrassing."

The barman nodded. "So do you want another pint then? One without a shamrock on its head?"

And it roles from there. Great stuff.

My posts this week:
Review of The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett
What we do or what others think we are?
Three stories: zonings, permissions and enforcement
Review of The Wild Blue by Stephen Ambrose
Radio work
Review of The Ice Harvest by Scott Phillips
Stories fade to haiku

Review of Dead I Well May Be by Adrian McKinty (Serpent’s Tail, 2003)

Michael Forsythe was introduced early to the school of hard knocks growing up in the working class estates of Belfast during the Troubles.  When he’s convicted of benefit fraud, Darkey White, a New York crime boss, pays for his travel to the United States.  To pay back his airfare, Forsythe works for White, running various rackets and scams, tussling with Irish Americans and the rising power of the Dominicans in Harlem and the Bronx.  Quick-witted, fearless, and handy in a tight corner, he makes a strong impression with both Darkey and his girlfriend, Bridget.  Foolishly he starts an affair with the fiery and passionate young woman; an affair that can only bring trouble.  And when the revenge comes it sends Forsythe on a hellish journey from which there seems little hope of return. 

Dead I May Well Be is a confident, bold and assured debut novel of great depth and storytelling.  Forsythe is a complex and well-drawn character and the rest of the cast are more than mere extras.  The writing is sharp and dark, the plot is rich and thick with political and philosophical insight, as well as violence and pathos, and the story zips along at a cracking pace.  McKinty does a good job of capturing the sights and sounds of pre-Giuliani New York City, and the personal relations within and between gangs.  And the dialogue and narrator’s voice are spot on.  If you’re looking for a hardboiled slice of noir with a fresh voice, then Dead I Well May Be is as good as place to start as you’re likely to get.  What I need right now, is his second novel – I fear they might be addictive.

Review of Fifty Grand by Adrian McKinty, Serpent’s Tail (2009)

The Irish crime blogs, Crime Always Pays and Crime Scene NI, have been heaping plaudits on Adrian McKinty for a number of weeks coinciding with the publication of Fifty Grand. Often when I read a book that’s given such strong endorsements I’m left a little disappointed because as good as the book is, it doesn’t quite live up to the expectation. I approached Fifty Grand then with a little bit of caution, especially after the highly negative review in the Irish Times a couple of weeks ago. I needn’t have worried - Fifty Grand is good as the hype and then some.

The frozen lake and the black vacuum sky and the dead man pleading for the return of his remaining days.
“There must be some kind of mistake.”
No.
“You’ve got the wrong guy.”
No.
“You’re gonna pay for this.”
Viejo Companero, I’ve paid in advance. And before he can come up with anymore material I unroll a line of duct tape, cut it, and place it over his mouth.

Mercado is a Cuban detective, her brother Ricky works as a journalist for the Cuba Times. Despite their father being branded a traitor, abandoning them as children to escape to the US to start a new life, they have managed to carve out careers for themselves. Then they get news that their father has been killed in a hit and run accident in the ski resort of Fairview, Colorado, an Aspen wannabe, where Hollywood film stars and producers are setting up home in luxury ski lodges. Nobody is brought to justice for the death of the local ratcatcher. To track down her father’s killer and avenge his death Mercado is determined to head to the US regardless of the consequences for her family and colleagues if she fails to return. Faking a trip to Mexico to attend an interview for a university course, she skips over the border and makes her way to Fairview, where the service labour are illegal immigrants under the direction of Esteban, a US-born Mexican, and the local Sheriff runs the town as his own personal fiefdom determined to cash in on the town’s growing popularity. Working as a maid to the rich and famous and posing as an insurance agent Mercado has only a few days to determine who the killer is, take her revenge, and make it back to Mexico before her travel permit expires. But nothing is as simple as it first appears.

McKinty’s narrative is taut, lyrical and well crafted. Fifty Grand is all muscle and no flab. The characterization is superb, the dialogue snappy and real, the story compelling, and the prose often reads like poetry. Mercado is a well drawn character, flawed, determined, conflicted; at sea in a consumerist society of which she has no experience, using her cop instincts to get by. McKinty does an excellent job of exposing modern Cuba and the politics and corruption of small town America and Hollywood celebrity without it ever becoming a sermon. There were a few plot conveniences and coincidences, but then there nearly always are and nothing stuck out as being so improbable that it ruined the story. I was hooked from the first page, gripped by Mercado’s journey and the various twists and turns.

Did I enjoy this book – hell, yes. Criticisms – minor stuff. Do I want to read his other books – right now! (they're already on order)