On Ill-Fated Gull-Winged White Elephants

I mentioned a couple of weeks back that I believe the Ireland AM Crime Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards will be something of a coin-toss between Tana French’s BROKEN HARBOUR and Adrian McKinty’s THE COLD COLD GROUND, and nothing has happened in the interim to change my mind. The sequel to THE COLD COLD GROUND is I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET (Serpent’s Tail), which will be published in January, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

Sean Duffy knows there’s no such thing as a perfect crime. But a torso in a suitcase is pretty close. Still, one tiny clue is all it takes, and there it is. A tattoo. So Duffy, fully fit and back at work after the severe trauma of his last case, is ready to follow the trail of blood - however faint - that always, always connects a body to its killer. A legendarily stubborn man, Duffy becomes obsessed with this mystery as a distraction from the ruins of his love life, and to push down the seed of self-doubt that he seems to have traded for his youthful arrogance. So from country lanes to city streets, Duffy works every angle. And wherever he goes, he smells a rat ...

  As is the case with COLD GROUND, SIRENS brilliantly captures the atmosphere of paranoia and barely controlled fury of 1980’s Northern Ireland, but it also comes with the added bonus of being - to the best of my knowledge - the first crime / mystery novel to feature the notoriously ill-fated gull-winged white elephant (aka the DeLorean car) as an integral part of the tale. Of course, I may well be revealing the depth of my ignorance here. If anyone can point me at mystery novels featuring DeLoreans, I’d love to see ’em …