Belfast. January 2005. Acting Detective Sergeant John O’Neill stands over the body of a dead teenager. The corpse was discovered on the building site of a luxury development overlooking the River Lagan. Kneecapped then killed, the body bears the hallmarks of a punishment beating. But this is the new Northern Ireland - the Celtic Tiger purrs, the Troubles are over, the paramilitaries are gone. So who is the boy? Why was he killed? O’Neill quickly realises that no one - his colleagues, the politicians, the press - cares who the kid is, making this case one of the toughest yet. And he needs to crack this one, his first job as Principle Investigator, or he risks ending up back in uniform. Disliked by the Chief Inspector and with his current rank yet to be ratified, O’Neill is in a precarious position. With acute insight, Matt McGuire’s cracking debut exposes the hidden underbelly of the new Northern Ireland, a world of drug dealing, financial corruption and vigilante justice.Sounds like a good one, especially if the good folks over at Euro Crime are to be believed.
So who is this Matt McGuire guy? Well, some diligent research - yep, a quick Google search - reveals the following:
Dr Matt McGuire was born in Belfast and gained his MA, MSc and PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Before coming to the University of Western Sydney he was a Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. He has published widely on various aspects of Irish and Scottish Literature, contemporary fiction and crime writing. His debut novel, DARK DAWN, was published by Constable Robinson and is coming out in April 2012.So there you have it. Yet more academic professor-types writing Irish crime fiction. Which is, surely, the literary equivalent of the second horse of the apocalypse. Or is it just that Irish dons are no more capable of resisting a nice, juicy murder than their Oxford counterparts? Answers on (used) fifty euro notes to the usual address, please …
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