Rating: 5/5
Review:
Another very good Duffy thriller
I thoroughly enjoyed this police thriller. It has its flaws, but not enough to spoil things for me and if anything I thought it was better than its predecessor, I Hear The Sirens In The Street.
Sean Duffy is a Detective Inspector in Northern Ireland in 1984. Or at least he was until insubordination, excessive drinking and so on in the last book caused him to be demoted to sergeant and removed from CID. In this book things get even worse until he's recruited by MI5 to find a terrorist leader with whom he was at school and is back on the force... These are such clichés of the genre that I wouldn't normally bother, but the book is so well written that I didn't mind a bit. Duffy is an engaging if flawed character, he and other are exceptionally convincingly drawn, and the period and place are very well evoked. Dialogue is excellent; it is crisp, believable and pretty accurate for the period (although people do mention "issues" and "closure" which, mercifully, hadn't infested the language by then.)
The plot is beautifully paced and utterly gripping. It has its silly elements, to be honest, including an almost with-a-single-bound-he-was-free Bulldog Drummond-esque escape and dash to prevent National Catastrophe, but I was quite happy to go along with it and stayed up far too late to finish the book. It's an exciting, deceptively well-researched and erudite read, and a very good portrait of a turbulent time and place. Recommended.
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