Norn Iron In The Soul

There’s a very interesting interview with Adrian McKinty in the Wall Street Journal, in which McKinty speaks about the influence of his childhood and growing up in Northern Ireland on his new series of novels, ‘the Troubles Trilogy’. To wit:

“Imagine if you had a bombing like [the Boston Marathon attack] every week for 30 years,” says Mr. McKinty, 45. The novelist grew up during ‘the Troubles,’ the euphemism commonly used to describe the decades of bloody sectarian violence that ravaged Northern Ireland throughout his childhood in the 1970s and ’80s. “That’s what it was like back home. I was born the year the Troubles began, in 1968. That world of violence was all I knew—people murdered, maimed, kneecapped, bombed. I don’t remember a time without a major atrocity of some kind every week.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Down Those Siren Streets A Man Must Go

I had an interview with Adrian McKinty published in the Irish Examiner last week to mark the publication of his latest tome, I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET. It kicked off a lot like this:

“The hunger strikes were so unbelievably intense,” says author Adrian McKinty. “I remember the week of Bobby Sands’ death and funeral almost minute-by-minute. The city was electric. In one way it was an amazingly fantastic experience, because everybody felt so alive, so immersed in that immediacy – and then, as soon as it was over, I just forgot it. Didn’t process it, didn’t deal with it. And it was years later, when I was telling my wife about it, she said, ‘Y’know, that’s really, really bizarre. None of that is normal.’”
  We’re talking about his new series of novels, which are set in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s and feature Sean Duffy, a Catholic policeman in the RUC. The first in the series, THE COLD COLD GROUND, was published last year. Set against the backdrop of the hunger strikes in 1981, it was the first time McKinty the writer had engaged with the traumatic sights and sounds that were an integral part of his formative years.
  “The things that happen to you as a child are probably the most important things that are going to happen to you in your life, from a developmental point of view,” he says. “And how else can I possibly talk about my childhood without talking about this craziness that was just terrible?”
  Born in Belfast and raised in Carrickfergus, Adrian McKinty was a part of the ‘brain drain’ that left Northern Ireland during the 1990s, first to attend university at Oxford, then to work in the US in bars and on building sites. His first novel, ORANGE RHYMES WITH EVERYTHING, was published in 1998 and told the story of ‘a man breaking out of a New York mental hospital and proceeding on a violent, bloody path back to Ireland’. That could well be the narrative arc of McKinty’s own publishing career.
  The critically acclaimed author was for many years reluctant to write about Northern Ireland (“I wrote about New York, and Denver, Mexico, Cuba – I mean, I wrote about anywhere else but Northern Ireland.”) but eventually the character of Sean Duffy proved irresistible.
  Perversely, McKinty, raised a Protestant in the staunchly loyal town of Carrickfergus, chose to make Sean Duffy a Catholic in the RUC.
  “It’s just so much more interesting to have an outsider in terms of all those different perspectives,” he shrugs. “In terms of class and religion, geography, background – Duffy can look at all these things with a jaundiced eye. Especially if I put him in a Protestant town. There was going to be all these lines of conflict, which is great for a writer. All these fracture lines coming together in this one character. I really had a lot of fun with that in the first book.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

The Sirens Are Singing Again

I mentioned back at the start of December that Adrian McKinty’s I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET would be published in early January; and lo! The day hath arrived. Adrian has a number of things to say about that over at his interweb lair, where he also publishes an extensive quote about SIRENS from Daniel Woodrell. I particularly like Woodrell’s description of Northern Ireland as “ … a uniquely beautiful and nasty part of the world I’d be scared to visit if everybody didn’t sound like they might be cousins of my dad on my mom’s side.”
  Anyway, the Irish Independent reviewed SIRENS on Saturday, kicking off thusly:

“Adrian McKinty has done it again. In the second episode of a promised trilogy on the exploits of Sean Duffy, a Catholic policeman in the RUC at the height of the Northern Troubles, he maintains the tension, the sense of period and the quirks of character that made THE COLD COLD GROUND such a compelling read.”

  So there you have it. McKinty’s fans won’t need much persuading to pick up I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET, but if you’re coming to him fresh, brace yourself - you’re in for a proper treat.
  Meanwhile, I’ll be interviewing Adrian about SIRENS when he touches down on the Oul’ Sod on Wednesday. If there’s anything you think I should ask him, be sure to let me know …

Cold Cold Comfort

I had an interview with Adrian McKinty (right) published in the Irish Examiner recently. It ran a lot like this:

Taboo or not taboo, that is the question. Adrian McKinty’s latest novel, THE COLD COLD GROUND, has for its backdrop one of the most contentious topics in recent Irish history, the IRA hunger strikes of 1981.
  “It is a taboo subject,” McKinty agrees. “In fact, the whole Troubles era is still a taboo. I had a conversation with a BBC NI producer once, we were discussing a potential commission. He was completely aghast when I told him that I wanted to do something about the Troubles. ‘That’s all behind us now, we want to look to the future,’ he said. Well, it isn’t behind me. I’ll never forget those days.
  “It’s also true,” he adds, “that if no one wants to talk about something, then that’s probably the very thing you should be talking about.”
  Born in 1968 in Carrickfergus, Co Antrim, McKinty grew up a child of the Troubles.
  “My memories of that time are so vivid that it was pretty easy coming up with material for the book,” he says. “For example, I used to get a lift to school from a neighbour who was a Major in the UDR. Every morning he would get down on his knees and check under his car for mercury-tilt bombs, and when he got the all-clear he would call my little brother, me and his son outside and we would get in the car and go to school. But then one day it was raining hard, and he decided just to skip it and called us out without checking under the car. Every week on the news you’d hear about a copper or a soldier, and sometimes their families, who were killed by a mercury-tilt device. So on that ride to school I literally thought I was going to die.”
  If you’re a writer, there are no such things as bad memories, only experiences to be retro-fitted for the sake of a story.
  “Of course,” he grins, “like the self-consuming novelist I am, I took the memory and put it in the book. But it was really an extraordinary time and the more I probed my own recollections, the more those gates opened. A lot of them were bad memories: the time I got knocked down by a police Land Rover in a hit-and-run, the fight I got into with a paramilitary hood and ended up with 18 stitches in my face, the time I planted a bullet in my sister’s handbag to see what would happen at a police checkpoint, our next door neighbour getting arrested for a triple homicide by seemingly half the British Army, bomb scares, bombs, riots … So, yeah, they sound like bad memories. But in many ways, they’re gold for a writer.”
  THE COLD COLD GROUND centres on Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy, who investigates a series of murders that appear to be the work of a killer taking advantage of the tensions created by the hunger strikes. As the name suggests, Sean Duffy is a Catholic. Why did McKinty, himself a Protestant, choose a Catholic RUC man for the hero of his book?
  “There were a couple of reasons,” he says. “I wanted Duffy to arrive in East Antrim as an outsider, and as an outsider he could cast a jaundiced eye on the toxic politics and culture of the area. And of course, I knew that as a Catholic Duffy would run right up against all the fault lines of the time, which would be tremendous material for a novelist. I grew up in a working class Protestant housing estate and I loved the idea of putting a cynical intellectual like Duffy in among those people. And as a Catholic copper, Duffy can never be completely comfortable in his own skin or in the company he keeps. His life is literally on the line every single day.
  “That he’s a Catholic in the RUC in 1981 would have been incredibly rare back then,” he says. “The IRA famously had a bounty on Catholic policemen and the RUC was completely distrusted by the Catholic community, so few joined. The force in that era would have been over 90% Protestant. So you’ve got a gifted but conflicted and fractured young man in a very hot-house environment.”
  McKinty has written six adult crime titles previous to THE COLD COLD GROUND (he also writes children’s fiction), but this is his first police procedural novel. Why the change in direction?
  “To be honest, I was never that enthused about the police procedural story,” he says, “but then I got to know Evan Hunter [Ed McBain] a little bit before he died, and I started reading his fantastic 87th precinct books and I gradually saw the possibilities of that type of book. What finally sold me was reading James Ellroy’s LA Quartet, which are fascinating takes on the procedural, and by then I knew that this was a genre I wanted to tackle.”
  THE COLD COLD GROUND blends the police procedural with a serial killer storyline, a rare development in the Irish crime novel, which has seen very few serial killer stories published despite the recent boom in Irish crime fiction.
  Is this because, officially at least, we have no record of a serial killer operating in Ireland?
  “I don’t know about the South,” says McKinty, “but in the North, serial killers just get absorbed into the paramilitaries. I knew several clearly deranged individuals who were high ranking paramilitaries. The Shankhill Butchers and Michael Stone are just a couple of examples of psychopaths who probably would have been ordinary, everyday serial killers had they grown up in a non-sectarian society.”
  McKinty currently lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and two daughters. Is it the case that he needed to travel to the other side of the planet before he could start writing about home?

  “I’m not sure I completely buy into this exilic notion that you have to leave a place to write about it,” says the author. “At the last stanza of TS Eliot’s Little Gidding, he says, “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Perhaps, but William Faulkner did a pretty good job writing about Oxford, Mississippi while living in Oxford, Mississippi his entire life.”
  McKinty’s novels have been very well received to date, particularly, and unusually, as audio books. The Dead Year (2007) won the ‘Audie’ for Best Thriller / Suspense Novel, while Audible.com chose last year’s offering Falling Glass as the Best Mystery / Thriller of 2011.
  “That’s all down to the narrator, I think,” says McKinty. “If you can get a good narrator, you’re in like Flynn. I’ve been fortunate with Gerard Doyle, who is incredibly popular and much sought after. I’m pretty sure if I’d done a Le Carré or a Douglas Adams and narrated the books myself, it would have been a complete disaster.”
  THE COLD COLD GROUND is being touted as the first of a proposed trilogy, and McKinty is looking forward to exploring Northern Ireland in the 1980s through DS Duffy’s eyes.
  “I’ve got so much material about that time and place and there are many more interesting places the character can go,” he says. “I’d love to get him in some kind of confrontation with the Thatcher government, for example, or get mixed up in the DeLorean disaster, or any number of things. And of course, musically, we’ll eventually have to get to his difficult ‘New Romantic’ years …”

  THE COLD COLD GROUND by Adrian McKinty is published by Serpent’s Tail.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

A Warm, Warm Reception

The latest crime fiction column appeared in the Irish Times yesterday, featuring reviews of the latest titles from Elmore Leonard, Margie Orford, Ann Cleeves, Parker Bilal, Patricia Cornwell and Adrian McKinty. This being, ostensibly, an outlet for Irish crime writing, and THE COLD COLD GROUND being a terrific novel which has had a very warm reception to date, I’ll focus on the McKinty. To wit:

The Carrickfergus writer Adrian McKinty plunges into the dark heart of Northern Ireland’s Troubles in THE COLD COLD GROUND (£12.99, Serpent’s Tail), as Det Sgt Sean Duffy finds himself investigating a series of linked murders against the backdrop of the hunger strikes in the spring of 1981. The setting represents an extraordinarily tense scenario in itself, but the fact that Duffy is a Catholic in a predominantly Protestant RUC adds yet another fascinating twist to McKinty’s neatly crafted plot. Written in a terse style, the novel is a literary thriller that is as concerned with exploring the poisonously claustrophobic demi-monde of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and the self-sabotaging contradictions of its place and time, as it is with providing the genre’s conventional thrills and spills. The result is a masterpiece of Troubles crime fiction: had David Peace, Eoin McNamee and Brian Moore sat down to brew up the great Troubles novel, they would have been very pleased indeed to have written THE COLD COLD GROUND. - Declan Burke

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  For those of you who have read THE COLD COLD GROUND, and fancy a dip into the work-in-progress of its sequel, clickety-click here …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE COLD COLD GROUND by Adrian McKinty

I reviewed Adrian McKinty’s THE COLD COLD GROUND for RTE’s Arena programme last week, in the very fine company of Arlene Hunt. The audio can be found here, with the gist of my review notes running thusly:

The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife.
  And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain. - Adrian McKinty, THE COLD COLD GROUND

  Adrian McKinty’s latest novel opens in the spring of 1981, with a group of RUC officers watching a Belfast riot from afar. The action is described in the first person by Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy, a Catholic in the predominantly Protestant RUC. The backdrop to the riots is the ongoing hunger strikes, although Duffy and his cohorts are a little disappointed with this particular riot:

“In fact we had seen better only last week when, in the hospital wing of The Maze Prison, IRA commander Bobby Sands had finally popped his clogs.”

  Against the powder-keg backdrop of the hunger strikes, DS Duffy investigates a number of murders that appeared to be linked: a homophobic serial killer seems to be targeting homosexuals. Given that Northern Ireland has had no previous experience of a serial killer, however, Duffy has his doubts, and believes that the murders may be perpetrated by someone using the homophobia, and the ongoing tension related to the hunger strikes, as an excuse to settle some personal, paramilitary-related scores …
  DS Sean Duffy is a fascinating character, being a Catholic police officer in a predominantly Protestant RUC at the time of the hunger strikes. This immediately gives his story an extra frisson, as sectarianism was at its height (or nadir) in Northern Ireland during the early 1980s. In fact, and despite being a police officer, DS Duffy keeps his religion a secret from his neighbours, allowing them to presume that he is a Protestant.
  That said, the sectarianism Duffy faces doesn’t necessarily lend itself to conflict. At work, for example, Duffy and his co-workers engage in sectarian banter in which Duffy gives as good as he gets. As often as not, the sectarianism manifests itself as lazy stereotyping; his Protestant superiors, for example, simply presume that Duffy, being a Catholic, must know virtually every other Catholic in Northern Ireland.
  Away from work, Duffy is the antithesis of the ultra-conservative RUC officer. He listens to the period’s more adventurous rock music, and occasionally smokes dope. He appears to be more laidback about life in general than his colleagues, particularly in terms of the sectarianism of Northern Ireland. When it becomes clear that a killer is targeting homosexuals, Duffy is much less homophobic in his attitude towards the gay community than most of his colleagues.
  It’s easy to see why McKinty picked the hunger strikes for a backdrop: the setting provides immediate tension, a sharply divided society, and a very vivid backdrop of continuous rioting. By the same token, the hunger strikes are still hugely important in the psyche of Northern Ireland, and have iconic status in large parts of the Catholic / Nationalist community. Any crime writer deploying the hunger strikes as a backdrop runs the risk of being accused of exploiting the period, and the sacrifices made, for the sake of a crime thriller.
  Having said all that, I got the impression that McKinty picked the hunger strikes for the backdrop to this novel not just because it would provide instant tension, but because that period, arguably, represented the nadir of the Troubles, and so serves as a kind of crucible for the worst that humanity is capable of.
  It’s worth mentioning, I think, that there has been very little by way of serial killer novels in Ireland until very recently. The only explicit examples I can think of are Rob Kitchin’s THE RULE BOOK and TABOO by Casey Hill, although it can be argued that Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE is a serial killer novel (in that particular case, the ‘serial killer’ is a sympathetic character, who kills to avenge others’ deaths). All three novels have appeared in the last two or three years. (Arlene Hunt’s novel THE CHOSEN is in part a serial killer novel, but that book is set in the US.)
  This may be because Ireland itself has had no history of serial killers - officially, at least. By the same token, Ireland has lent itself over the years to being a place where a psychopath could very easily indulge a homicidal streak by signing up to one or another political / paramilitary creed. The Shankhill Butchers, for example, were serial killers in all but name.
  As for the style, McKinty quickly establishes and maintains a pacy narrative, but he does a sight more too. McKinty brings a quality of muscular poetry to his prose, and the opening paragraph quoted above is as good an example as any. He belongs in a select group of crime writers, those you would read for the quality of their prose alone: James Lee Burke, John Connolly, Eoin McNamee, David Peace, James Ellroy.
  I should probably have pointed out before beginning this review that I’ve been a fan of Adrian McKinty’s work since his first novel, DEAD I WELL MAY BE. I think he’s one of the best crime writers currently working today, and I also think that THE COLD COLD GROUND is his best novel since his debut. Given its backdrop, and the fact that the hunger strikes are still to a great extent a taboo subject in fiction, I would also argue that THE COLD COLD GROUND is an important novel too. - Declan Burke

CAPNYA: Or, The Crime Always Pays Novel of the Year Award!

A trumpet-parp please, maestro. The votes are in, the counts have been tallied, the hanging chads ignored, and the winner emerges triumphant. The short-list consisted of THE BURNING SOUL by John Connolly, THE RAGE by Gene Kerrigan and FALLING GLASS by Adrian McKinty, and - ta-da! - it’s FALLING GLASS that wins the hardly-coveted-at-all Crime Always Pays Novel of the Year Award!
  Now all I need to do is come up with some kind of trophy to mark the occasion. Meanwhile, it’s a hearty congrats to Adrian McKinty, not least, as I’ve said before, because 2011 was yet another very fine year for Irish crime writing. Incidentally, FALLING GLASS has already secured the significantly-more-coveted Audible.com Best Mystery / Thriller of the Year. Which just goes to prove that the readers of this blog, if not its host, have impeccably good taste …
  I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised, by the way, if McKinty’s forthcoming tome, THE COLD COLD GROUND, doesn’t feature on a number of 2012’s Best Of lists. It’s due in January, and I’ve already gone on the record about it on these pages, with the gist running thusly:

“The hunger strikes mark the bleakest period of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’, and it’s entirely fitting that Adrian McKinty should be the writer to plunge into that darkest of hearts. It’s a rare author who can write so beautifully about such a poisonous atmosphere, but McKinty’s prose is a master-class in vicious poise as he explores the apparent contradictions that underpin Ulster’s self-loathing. Be in no doubt that this novel is a masterpiece: had David Peace, Eoin McNamee and Brian Moore sat down to brew up the great ‘Troubles’ novel, they would have been very pleased indeed to have written THE COLD COLD GROUND.”

  Very pleased I was, not to mention a little gobsmacked, to see a line from that little lot quoted on the back cover blurb of THE COLD COLD GROUND when it fell through my letterbox last Monday morning. But don’t take my word for it. The various blurbs also feature Stuart Neville (“A razor-sharp thriller with style, courage and dark-as-night wit … brilliant”) and Brian McGilloway (“A brilliant piece of work which does for Northern Ireland what [David] Peace’s Red Riding Quartet did for Yorkshire”).
  So there you have it. THE COLD COLD GROUND by Adrian McKinty. Don’t say you haven’t been warned …
  As for my own favourite novels of the year, well, 2011 was a year in which I was fairly spoiled. They are, in roughly the order I read them:

THE TERROR OF LIVING by Urban Waite;
CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER by Tom Franklin;
THE GLASS RAINBOW by James Lee Burke;
CITY OF THE DEAD by Sara Gran;
THE TROUBLED MAN by Henning Mankell;
THE FATAL TOUCH by Conor Fitzgerald;
THE DEVOTION OF SUSPECT X by Keigo Higashino;
THE CALLER by Karin Fossum;
FALLING GLASS by Adrian McKinty;
THE WATCHERS by Jon Steele;
LASTING DAMAGE by Sophie Hannah;
BLOODLAND by Alan Glynn;
THE BURNING SOUL by John Connolly;
THE END OF EVERYTHING by Megan Abbott;
A SINGLE SHOT by Matthew F. Jones;
DADDY’S GIRL by Margie Orford;

  Winnowing those down for the purpose of picking my overall favourite, I find myself stuck on three titles:

CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER by Tom Franklin;
THE BURNING SOUL by John Connolly;
THE END OF EVERYTHING by Megan Abbott;

  Trust me, on this much at least: blow your book token vouchers on those three titles, and you won’t be disappointed.
  Finally, it’s over to you, dear reader. What was your favourite crime title of the year? The comment box is now open …

On Small But Perfectly Formed Readerships

I mentioned last month that Adrian McKinty’s very fine novel THE COLD COLD GROUND is coming your way in January, but there’s also some excellent news about his 2011 offering, FALLING GLASS. For lo! Audible.com has picked FALLING GLASS as its Best Mystery / Thriller of the Year. Nice one, my son.
  Naturally, the award has sent McKinty into a dizzying downward spiral of self-examination over at his blog, wherein he talks about the titanic effort required to write novels when the world at large, for the most part, doesn’t seem to care. He then goes on to say this:

“But maybe the struggle is the point. I bet if I put my mind to it I could write a knock-off Michael Connelly or Lee Child and make boatloads of cash. But I don’t want to. I’m not that much of a cynic and books are too important to me. I don’t want to write for money or for the whims of editors in corner offices, I want to write the books that move me and make me think and make me excited. My readers get invested not just in the characters and the story but also in the words and sentences that make up the story. My readers like irony and judicial profanity. My readers like a good joke and a well turned phrase. My readers admire wit. My readers know who Seamus Heaney is. My readers DON’T HAVE TO HAVE EVERY LAST THING EXPLAINED TO THEM. My readers aren’t prudes. My readers don’t have to be told why its wrong to pour a shamrock on the head of a pint of Guinness. My readers can spot the gag in the sentence that begins chapter 2 of FALLING GLASS. My readers can recite poems from memory. My readers aren’t frightened by a page without dialogue. My readers can name the Presidents back to 1932. My readers are sometimes poleaxed but seldom banjaxed. My readers are a select group and, you know what, I’m really glad about that. Slainte.”

  God bless you, sir, and long may you run.

The Fertile, Fertile Ground

I interviewed Stuart Neville a couple of weeks ago, to mark the publication of STOLEN SOULS, and during the course of the conversation we discussed the fact that his new novel is a less political beast than his previous offerings, THE TWELVE and COLLUSION. Stuart had this to say:

“I know other writers are working in different directions on this,” he says. “I’ve just finished reading Adrian McKinty’s new book, THE COLD COLD GROUND, in which he dives headlong into the thick of the Troubles and the hunger strikes, which is admirable, I think. I do think the Troubles will be quite fertile ground for writers the further we move away from them, and the freer we are to write about them with a more dispassionate gaze.”

  We’ve already had some very fine novels set during the Troubles, of course, including Eoin McNamee’s RESURRECTION MEN and THE ULTRAS, and David Parks’ THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, and Colin Bateman’s DIVORCING JACK. Adrian McKinty’s latest offering, THE COLD COLD GROUND works the same kind of ground covered by McNamee, setting his fictional tale against a historical backdrop, in this case the hunger strikes of 1981. My take runs thusly:

“The hunger strikes mark the bleakest period of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’, and it’s entirely fitting that Adrian McKinty should be the writer to plunge into that darkest of hearts. It’s a rare author who can write so beautifully about such a poisonous atmosphere, but McKinty’s prose is a master-class in vicious poise as he explores the apparent contradictions that underpin Ulster’s self-loathing. Be in no doubt that this novel is a masterpiece: had David Peace, Eoin McNamee and Brian Moore sat down to brew up the great ‘Troubles’ novel, they would have been very pleased indeed to have written THE COLD COLD GROUND.”

  For more in a similar vein, from far better scribes and I, clickety-click on Adrian’s blog.
  Meanwhile, the novel is published on January 5th by Serpent’s Tail. If your New Year’s resolution is to only read great books next year, THE COLD COLD GROUND is the perfect place to start …

Hate In A Cold Climate

I was at the launch of the Irish Book Awards short-lists last Thursday morning, during the course of which I was introduced to a PR lady who, on hearing that I’m a crime writer, began babbling about this terrific new book coming in January of next year by Adrian McKinty. “I’ve heard of him,” sez I. “Rumour has it he’s not half-bad …”
  The new book the lady was referring to is THE COLD, COLD GROUND, a standalone title from McKinty that I’m very much hoping will become the first in a series; I read it a couple of months ago, and it’s superb. Herewith be the blurb elves:

Northern Ireland. Spring 1981. Hunger strikes. Riots. Power cuts. A homophobic serial killer with a penchant for opera. A young woman’s suicide that may yet turn out to be murder. On the surface, these events are unconnected, but then things - and people - aren’t always what they seem. Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy is trying to get to the bottom of it all, but it’s no easy job - especially for a Catholic policeman at the height of the Troubles.

  His publishers are calling McKinty ‘the David Peace of Northern Ireland’, which is lavish indeed, and they’re not the only ones to be lauding him. Ken Bruen opened up his brand new blog with a post about COLD, COLD GROUND, calling it ‘riveting, brilliant, and just about the best book yet on Northern Ireland’.
  COLD, COLD GROUND is published on January 5th; if I were you, I’d get it on my Christmas wish-list now. Meantime, why not drop on over to Ken Bruen’s blog and welcome him to the blogosphere? He loves a good chat, does Ken …