Review of Hurt by Brian McGilloway (Constable, 2013)

December in Derry and the body of a sixteen year old is found on train tracks.  The victim’s phone and social media suggests she was groomed by a man using multiple identities before being enticed to meet him.  When a second teenage girl goes missing Sergeant Lucy Black and her colleagues are determined to find her before she suffers the same fate.  Given the anonymity of the internet, the on-going sectarian divisions and the strained relationship between community and police, plus her continued stressed relationship with her superiors, including her boss who happens to be her estranged mother, tracking down the abductor and killer is not going to be straightforward.

Hurt is the second book in the Lucy Black series set in and around Derry in Northern Ireland.  As with McGilloway’s previous books he captures well the tense social relations of the sectarian city and complex set of community relations.  The tale focuses on the internet grooming of teenage girls and the discovery of the body of one, her throat cut, and the disappearance of another.  The context with respect to the grooming is nicely done.  However, the story is fairly straightforward and tension added through the focus on Lucy and her investigation felt a little hollow.  Black is cast as somewhat of a loner, pursuing her own path and constantly battling her superiors, including her mother, her senior officer.  While the mother is set up to play a negative foil given Lucy’s foolhardy antics I found myself agreeing more-and-more with the mother’s dressing-downs.  Moreover, I couldn’t work out why Lucy’s unit seemed to only have two staff - her and her alcoholic boss.  The result was I never quite believed Lucy’s detective work, especially those bits where she decides to head into potentially dangerous situations unaccompanied.  Nonetheless an engaging tale with good social context.

Review of Little Girl Lost by Brian McGilloway (2011, Macmillan)

Detective Sergeant Lucy Black has moved to Derry so she can be nearer to her father.  An ex-policeman forced away from the area at the height of the Troubles, he has returned home and now has dementia.  Her estranged mother has also returned, but as Assistant Chief Constable, and is now Lucy’s boss.  It’s not an ideal scenario and its made more challenging when Lucy is transferred internally away from CID at her mother’s behest.  First at the scene of a reported sighting of a local girl who’s been kidnapped she’d discovered another younger girl walking in the woods in the snow in bloodstained pyjamas.  Whilst CID search for the kidnapped girl, Lucy tries to determine who the young girl is and why she was in the woods.  Tracking down her own leads she keeps circling back to the kidnapping, much to the chagrin of her superiors.  But Lucy is her own woman and she’s determined to get to the truth of the little girl lost.

After five Inspector Devlin books set along the Irish border, Brian McGilloway turned his attention to a new series featuring Detective Sergeant Lucy Black set in Derry.  Like the Devlin books, the legacy of the Troubles haunts the tale, as it would for just about story involving the police in Northern Ireland, and McGilloway does a good job of weaving the past with the present.  He also does a decent job of balancing the narrative between Lucy Black’s work and personal life, and in so doing ensures two strong hooks: a pair of interwoven police cases (a young girl found wandering in the snow in ancient woodland and a kidnapped teenager), along with the unfolding personal challenges of an engaging lead character.  The result is a nicely constructed police procedural with a compelling plot, a good sense of place and time, and a great deal of heart.  The only downsides were a little too many coincidences intertwining the professional and personal and an extra twist at the end felt a little forced.  Nonetheless, a solid start to what seems set to be a strong series.

No Alibis for McGilloway and Quinn

Monday evening I finally got to No Alibis bookshop in Belfast where I listened to readings and a conversation between Brian McGilloway and Anthony Quinn, with Andrew Pepper asking the questions.  It was an excellent event in a wonderful venue and I had the bonus of going to dinner with them afterwards.  The next day I went back and bought a bag of books.  Definitely a place I'll be visiting each time I go back to Belfast.

Frei Betto, Hotel Brasil
Parker Bilal, Dogstar Rising
Peter Coris, The Dunbar Case 
Didier Daeninckx, Nazis on the Metro
Bill James, Easy Streets
Brian McGilloway, Little Girl Lost
Andrew Pepper, The Detective Branch
Anthony Quinn, Border Angels

Review of The Nameless Dead by Brian McGilloway (Pan, 2012)

The island of Islandmore lies in the no-man’s land of the River Foyle that separates the Republic of Ireland from the North; the border runs right down the centre of the small slither of land.  In the past it has been used by fishermen, smugglers and as the site of a cillin - a non-consecrated burial site for children who died before they could be baptised.  A recent submission to the Commission of the Location of Victims’ Remains suggests it was used in the Troubles as a burial site for one of those that 'disappeared'.  As the Commission searches the island, using geophysics, a cadaver dog and diggers, for the body of Declan Cleary, who vanished in the 1970s after supposedly informing on a man that was then shot by the British Army, they find the body of a baby buried sometime in the recent past.  The postmodern reveals that she had been strangled.  Inspector Ben Devlin would like to investigate, but the law states that no death discovered by the Commission can be followed up on and prosecuted, even those that were not part of the Troubles.  Undeterred he starts to poke around, but is soon distracted by a fresh murder; it seems the dig on the island has bought old animosities to the surface once again.  Devlin starts to probe further into Cleary’s and the island’s past looking for clues, but is hampered by the fact that much of the case resides in North, outside of his jurisdiction.

The Nameless Dead is the fifth instalment of McGilloway’s Ben Devlin series.  McGilloway has the full measure of Devlin’s world - his family, police politics and rivalries, his embedding in the social and criminal landscape of the border.  The writing is very assured, with a lovely cadence and pace, and nicely balances plot, characterization, sense of place and contextualisation.  With respect to the latter two, The Nameless Dead skilfully weaves together the troubles and sexual politics of the 1970s with the politics of peace and reconciliation and the social realities and landscape of the post-Celtic Tiger crash in the border counties.  The plotting is particularly well done, interlacing a number of subplots to produce a layered and textured story that charts both the investigation and Devlin’s personal life.  Whilst the focus is very much Devlin, importantly McGilloway also adds flesh to the series’ secondary characters, and the ongoing subplots adds to the overarching arc of the series.  Overall, The Nameless Dead is a satisfying and superior police procedural in what is shaping up to be a very accomplished and enjoyable series.

Review of Gallows Lane by Brian McGilloway (Pan, 2008)

When James Kerr arrives back into Lifford, an Irish border town, after serving time in the North for driving the get-away car in an armed robbery, he sets in train a sequence of events centred on Gallows Lane, where an arms and drugs cache has just been found.  Inspector Ben Devlin meets the born-again Kerr at the border, but he soon slips away after professing the need to sort one thing out before leaving the area for good.  Not long after a stranger is seen lurking in a garden off Gallows Lane, and then the owner, an Englishman with strong republican beliefs is found hanging from a tree.  Distracting Devlin from the case are station politics and internal rivalries, an upcoming interview for promotion, a break-in at a local pharmacy, and the slaying of a young girl, beaten to death on a building site.  As the summer heatwave builds, so the bodies start to pile up, and Devlin not only has to contend with solving two sets of murders – one seemingly centred on Kerr, the other around the young girl – but also threats and attacks against himself, and detectives from Dublin muscling in on his cases.

It took me a little while to get into Gallows Lane.  The first 100 pages or so seemed ponderous, and somehow lacking, and I wasn’t sure about some of the police organisation and procedural elements.  Slowly, however, I was drawn ever further into the book, all the careful groundwork laid out in the early stages gaining its significance as the various threads are pulled ever tighter.  McGilloway’s skill is in the plotting and sense of place.  He weaves several subplots in and through each other, although as with Borderlands some of the story is a little over the top, some situations are clearly plot devices, and I had difficulty believing the resolution of two strands.  The result is a slow burner that shifts through the gears into a real page turner.  He also does a good job of setting the reader in small town Ireland and the landscape along the Donegal/Derry border.  Where the book struggles a little, I feel, is with characterisation.  Devlin is well drawn and an interesting enough character – a committed family man that seems vulnerable to temptation, prepared to cut corners, occasionally hot tempered and prone to panic attacks.  Many of the other characters, however, are underdeveloped.  For example, we get little sense of Devlin’s wife, or the principal victims or perpetrators, or some of his colleagues, with little in the way of back stories and motivations.  This is partly due to the large cast and partly due to the pacing, where characters are getting little ‘page time’.  Regardless, McGilloway’s Inspector Devlin series is developing nicely and I’m looking forward to the next two books.  Comparisons are often made to Rankin and Dexter, but I think Robinson and Booth are probably nearer the mark.