You Can’t Handle The Ruth

Good news for Ruth ‘Cuddly’ Dudley Edwards: AFTERMATH: THE OMAGH BOMBING AND THE FAMILIES’ PURSUIT OF JUSTICE makes it onto Crime Always Pays’ long-list for the Longest Subtitle of the Year, alongside Fintan O’Toole’s SHIP OF FOOLS: HOW CORRUPTION AND STUPIDITY KILLED THE CELTIC TIGER. That both have also been nominated for the Orwell Prize, an award which recognises excellence in political writing, is a nifty little coincidence, as Irish Publishing News fails to report in its otherwise excellent coverage.
  Elsewhere, Marcel Berlins reviews Brian McGilloway’s THE RISING over in The Times. To wit:

“THE RISING continues Brian McGilloway’s excellent run of novels featuring Benjamin Devlin, the Irish Garda inspector. He unsuccessfully tries to save the life of a man trapped in a burning barn; the victim turns out to be a drug dealer. He’s called by a former police colleague whose 15-year-old son is missing; that too involves drugs. As the inquiries become more complex, Devlin is faced with a life-or-death crisis very close to him. Devlin bucks the crime-fiction trend by being just a good ordinary cop, a sympathetic family man without too many hang-ups or foibles. The novel is no worse off for that.” – Marcel Berlins, The Times

  Brian, by the way, will be launching THE RISING at the Verbal Arts Centre in Derry on Wednesday evening, the 31st, at 6.30pm, and all are welcome, but particularly those with an excess of cash and a keen interest in purchasing a very fine novel.
  Meanwhile, your humble scribe had a review of Louise Welch’s NAMING THE BONES published in the Sunday Business Post a couple of weeks back, which kicks off like this:

The conventional crime novel tends to unfold over three acts, but Louise Welsh’s fourth novel, NAMING THE BONES, is very much a novel of two halves. In the first half it’s an understated academic novel detailing the travails of Dr Murray Watson, a University of Glasgow English lecturer intent on reviving the reputation of a little-known poet, Archie Lunan, and solving the mystery of his death on Lismore Island 30 years before. Frustrated as he tries to piece together the scanty details of Lunan’s life, Watson is also the dominated party in an affair he’s having with Rachel, the wife of his department head ...

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Nobody Move, This Is A Handful Of Reviews

A busy old weekend on the reviewing front, folks, with sundry big-ups popping into ye olde inbox. To wit:

“Adrian McKinty’s wonderful Dead Trilogy confirmed him as a master of modern noir, up there with Dennis Lehane and James Ellroy … FIFTY GRAND is a blast: a standalone effort which again showcases McKinty’s brutal lyricism as well as his sensitivity to the indignities of the immigrant experience … What matters is Mercado herself, the one-time winner (she tells us proudly) of the Dr Ernesto Guevara Young Poets’ prize. It’s a pleasure to be around someone so sharp and resourceful, noticing what she notices and feeling what she feels.” – John O’Connell, The Guardian

“Clearly influenced by Child and Joseph Finder, Black drives his hero into the tightest spots with a force and energy that jump off the page. He still has a little to learn when it comes to depth of character and pacing, but that won’t take long. Lock is clearly going to be around for a long time. With a spine-tingling finale that reminded me of Die Hard, this is a writer, and a hero, to watch.” – Geoffrey Wansell, Daily Mail

“I for one am a big fan of the police procedural as a genre, and [Rob] Kitchin gives us an excellent version [in THE RULE BOOK], emphasizing not the lurid crimes committed by the serial killer but the sometimes plodding pursuit of the killer in the detectives' meticulous methodology … Kitchin’s skill in maintaining that pace as well as the naturalism of the characters and setting is quite impressive in a first novel.” – Glenn Harper, International Noir

“Neville is the kind of fierce new voice that the thriller genre cries out for. His prose is sharp and deadly, his characters never less than complex. And for all THE TWELVE could easily have been a simple drama of revenge, a kind of Death Wish with an Irish accent, it feels somehow deeper and any answers you think have been offered are tempered with further questions. This is a thinking man’s thriller, as philosophical as it is visceral, and a novel I urge you to out and read.” – Russel McLean, Crime Scene Scotland

“THE TWELVE is a tough, uncompromising thriller, technically very well paced and solidly constructed in the best, tragic, noir fiction tradition, though possibly not one for the faint-hearted.” – Mike Ripley, Euro Crime

“Ruth Dudley Edwards, a fundraiser for the families, gives an insider’s account of the campaign, starting with the harrowing details of the blast. First responders tell of the difficulties of identifying headless bodies and of limbs lying in the street amid the debris. Blood ran from the doors of buses pressed into service as ambulances — the injured screaming at every speed bump on the way to the hospital. She hints at the drinking, the marriage break-ups and the suicide attempts that were the ripple effect of the atrocity. The victims squabble and at times come close to buckling under the strain as they move forward towards a court showdown that most experts predicted they would lose.” – Liam Clarke, The Sunday Times

Two Tales, One City

Work commitments – not to mention an irrational phobia of bowler hats – will keep me away from Belfast next Wednesday evening, although maybe that’s just as well, given that there’d be something of a conflict of interest were I to wander north. For lo! There’s not one but two quality book launches happening that evening in Belfast, the first for AFTERMATH, Ruth ‘Cuddly’ Dudley Edwards’ new tome about the Omagh bombing. Quoth the blurb elves:

The Omagh bomb was the worst massacre in Northern Ireland’s modern history - yet from it came a most extraordinary tale of human resilience, as families of murdered people channelled their grief into action. As the bombers congratulated themselves on escaping justice, the families determined on a civil case against them and their organisation. No one had ever done this before. It was a very domestic atrocity. In Omagh, on Saturday, 15 August, 1998, a massive bomb placed by the so-called Real IRA murdered unborn twins, five men, fourteen women and nine children, of whom two were Spanish and one English: the dead included Protestants, Catholics and a Mormon. Although the police believed they knew the identities of the killers, there was insufficient evidence to bring charges. Taking as their motto ‘For evil to triumph, all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing’, families of ten of the dead decided to pursue these men through the civil courts, where the burden of proof is lower. This is the remarkable account of how these families - who had no knowledge of the law and no money, and included a cleaner, a mechanic and a bookie - became internationally recognised, formidable campaigners and surmounted countless daunting obstacles to win a famous victory. How these mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers turned themselves into the scourge of the Real IRA is not just an astonishing story in itself. It is also a universal story of David challenging Goliath, as well as an inspiration to ordinary people anywhere devastated by terrorism.

  The launch for AFTERMATH takes place at the Bookshop at Queen’s University on Wednesday 8th, with the gig kicking off at 5.30pm and featuring Michael Gallagher, Brett Lockhart QC and Jason McCue as speakers.
  Meanwhile, over at No Alibis on Botanic Avenue, Adrian McKinty (right) will be doing a reading from FIFTY GRAND, to mark the UK publication of said opus, that event kicking off at 6pm. I’ve pretty much run out of superlatives to describe FIFTY GRAND, so suffice to say that if you scroll down a smidgeroo, you can avail of the opportunity to win a signed copy of this very, very fine novel.
  Happily, Belfast is a pretty compact city, and those of you dedicated to the cause can scoot along to Queen’s for the AFTERMATH launch, and then nip around the corner to Botanic Avenue for the McKinty jamboree. If you time it right, you might even get to skip the boring bit (McKinty reading) and cut straight to the entertainment (McKinty trying to juke out of paying his round for the rest of the evening). Bon chance, mes amis …