Review by New York Times Review
Gene Kerrigan's new police procedural, THE RAGE (Europa, paper, $17), isn't your typical Irish crime novel with moody cops and colorful crooks who talk like poets and act like animals. The singular characters who go about their business in Dublin's crippled economy may be on opposite sides of the law, but in Kerrigan's book they're all working-class stiffs struggling to get by. Everybody seems to have an opinion on the depressed state of the nation. "The politicians fell in love with the smart fellas," according to an old union man, "and in the end it was the smart fellas broke the country in pieces." That's pretty close to a midlevel gangster's view that "the big boys got too greedy, ran everything off a cliff." It falls to public servants like Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey to keep this barely contained anger from getting out of hand, as it does when an unknown party guns down a banker named Emmet Sweetman in the hallway of his tastefully appointed mansion. In no time at all, people are tossing Molotov cocktails into banks and beating up financiers and real estate developers. While the Sweetman case hovers in limbo, Kerrigan sets in motion a criminal scheme that gives all the principals a chance to exercise their individual work ethics. One key player in this drama is Vincent Naylor, a young ex-con with ambitions to better himself by being more selective about his crooked pursuits. ("The next time Vincent Naylor went to jail it would be for something worthwhile.") It's a class thing with Vincent. He makes a point of robbing snobby stores that sell merchandise at inflated "Celtic Tiger prices" and figures that knocking off an armored security truck loaded with bank money would be almost patriotic. By the time Vincent's plan is good to go, he has acquired an extensive group of criminal associates - and caught the eye of an ex-nun who knows trouble when she sees it. Kerrigan's clean, spare style adapts smoothly to the striving characters who lend their many voices to this narrative. The crooks may be more direct in their language and clear about their goals than the morally ambivalent Tidey. What's more striking, though, is the similarity of their aspirations and the familiarity of their discontents. (Vincent actually has a healthier relationship with his live-in girlfriend than Tidey does with his ex-wife, sneaking in and out of her bed so he won't upset their children.) Beneath the skin all these characters are underdogs, snarling with rage at being kicked too long by the crooked politicians, bankers and other looters who ran their country into the ground. What a nightmare! Two bodies have been unearthed in your flower beds, and you have no idea how they got there. But cheer up - the police might have dug up the body you personally planted at the edge of the wood. That's the premise of THREE GRAVES FULL (Gallery, $24.99), Jamie Mason's ripping good novel about Jason Getty, who suffers a lifetime of bullying until the day he gives in to "a howling primal rage" and turns on his tormentor. Masochist that he is, Jason had invited the predatory Gary Harris into his life with no more thought than those silly virgins who open their bedroom windows to Dracula. But Gary's cruelty extends beyond the grave. Mason has a witty and wicked imagination, yet she's also responsive to the pain of inarticulate people like Jason. Although he's become accustomed to sleeping in an empty bed, he's stirred by the sound of rustling sheets, "the background music of not being alone." Small towns promise many things: security, tranquillity and a sense of community. But all it takes is an act of violence for a small town to take back those promises. That's what Nora Hamilton learns in Jenny Milchman's quietly unnerving novel, COVER OF SNOW (Ballantine, $26), when Nora's husband, Brendan, inexplicably hangs himself. Brendan was a popular member of his hometown police force in Wedeskyull, a rugged outpost in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. But Nora will always be a stranger here, she realizes, when everyone stonewalls her efforts to uncover whatever secrets in her husband's past drove him to kill himself. Although the solution to these mysteries is too obvious to raise goose bumps, Milchman reveals an intimate knowledge of the psychology of grief, along with a painterly gift for converting frozen feelings into scenes of a forbidding winter landscape. Despite claiming he's retired, Lawrence Block can't seem to resist taking a few swigs from the poisoned cup. HIT ME (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26.99) brings back his most fatally appealing protagonist, the professional hit man known as Keller, last sighted in New Orleans with the newly acquired baggage of a wife, a baby and a construction business. Keller's passion for rare stamps leads him to take on a special assignment from his old booking agent, Dot, who has resurfaced in Sedona, Ariz. And soon enough, this imperfectly socialized killer is back in the game, taking contracts in cities like Dallas and New York, where a man can always find a good stamp auction. Aside from their ingenious methodology, what makes these amuse-bouches so delectable are the moral dilemmas Block throws up to deflect his philosophical antihero from a given task. Any assassin might hesitate to murder a child, but only Keller would ponder the ethics of killing someone whose premature death would rob a prostitute of payment for her professional services. In a flash, people are tossing Molotov cocktails into banks and beating up financiers.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 3, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Welcome to Dublin, where the economy has tanked, and violence has surged. Vincent Naylor walks out of prison and right back into the same business that landed him there, armed robbery. Working with his dimmer brother, Noel, and some friends, they kidnap an armored truck driver to learn how the system works, setting up for their biggest score yet. Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey is working the murder of an investment banker and contemplating perjuring himself in an upcoming trial when he gets a tip from an old nun that a strange car has been parked on her street for some time. That car turns out to be the getaway car, and that phone call changes lives when two of the men involved in the robbery are killed in the street. Vincent takes off on a revenge spree, and Tidey can't help but reexamine his own life. The sparse writing style seems well-matched to the content in this tense, thoughtful thriller, which won the UK's Gold Dagger award for best crime novel of the year. Fans of Ken Bruen, Declan Hughes, and Declan Burke won't want to miss this one.--Alesi, Stacy Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Taut prose distinguishes Kerrigan's accomplished crime novel set in contemporary Dublin. Det. Sgt. Bob Tidey faces a moral quandary after investigating a banker's murder. Former nun Maura Coady, who keeps watch over a quiet suburb, makes a fateful phone call, while within the city's criminal underbelly, swaggering Vincent Naylor and his brother, Noel, are preparing for their next big heist. Kerrigan (Little Criminals) touches on broader social and political issues, from the Irish housing bubble to the long shadows cast by abuse within the Catholic church, which deepen rather than distract from the main action as it speeds ahead with wheels shrieking, preparing the reader for an ending whose inevitability doesn't diminish its explosive impact. While these Dublin streetscapes lack the hard glamour of L.A. noir, Tidey emerges as a prototypical Raymond Chandler hero, holding fast to his moral compass in a corrupt world that demands compromise even from good men. Agent: Melanie Jackson, the Melanie Jackson Agency. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Kerrigan is an award-winning Irish journalist (Round Up The Usual Suspects) whose crime fiction (A Midnight Choir; Little Criminals) has an authenticity born of a socialist worldview, great writing, and a feel for the criminal and paramilitary gangs operating in urban Dublin. He deals here with "tiger kidnappings," the post-Celtic Tiger miasma of ruin, the recently published reports on clerical abuse, police collaboration with politicians, etc. The protagonist is Detective Tidey, a complex, flawed, but humane individual. Tidey is dealing with a surfeit of domestic and work pressures while pursuing his investigations, using unorthodox measures if required, including perjury. The novel centers around his attempt to solve the murder of a high-flying banker, which eventually links to an Ordinary Decent Criminal (ODC) operation that goes awry. The rage that follows is visceral and lethal. It is also a metaphor for the suppressed rage of many Irish from years of abuse, exploitation, greed, and negligence of bankers, speculators, and politicians. VERDICT For authenticity, narrative, plot, writing skill, the gritty noirish crime milieu setting, and the post-Celtic-Tiger-Ireland toxicity, Kerrigan's latest well deserves its CWA Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year.-Seamus Scanlon, Ctr. for Worker Education, CUNY (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In contemporary Dublin, a hastily devised robbery and its aftermath unfold from the perspectives of diverse perps, cops and witnesses. Such is the moral ambiguity surrounding Detective Sgt. Bob Tidey's job that the very first time he is to take the stand in an important case as a witness rather than an investigator, he struggles with whether to commit perjury by contradicting his original statement, something that will cause him headaches at work but smooth the ruffled feathers of a local politico. Meanwhile, unrepentant thief Vincent Naylor, back on the street after a stint in prison, has no such reservations about returning to his life of crime. He and his brother Noel, teaming up with minor crime boss Albert Bannerman, hatch a plan to rob a van used by the Ulster Bank. As Vincent gets a closer look at Bannerman's ragtag gang, he has second thoughts, exacerbated by his cresting love for hairdresser Michelle Flood, but eventually decides that it's too late to turn back. Tidey gets a heads-up about the plan from Maura Coady, a retired and very observant nun with whom he has a deep and complex relationship. (An elliptical prologue foreshadows the relationship and the death of a man named Emmett Sweetman, which will cast a long shadow over later events.) Missteps in the crime generate their own subplots, which Kerrigan (Little Criminals, 2005, etc.) juggles deftly. An ambitious and nuanced panorama of law and order in Ireland's mean streets, balancing literary elements and full-bodied character portraits with a believable depiction of cops and criminals at work.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
