Adrian McKinty - Gun Street Girl

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Probably his best so far

This is another very good novel from Adrian McKinty. Set in Northern Ireland in 1985, it is the fourth in his series featuring Sean Duffy, a CID inspector in the RUC. It is helpful to have read the first three but certainly not essential and this stands perfectly well on its own.

The plot of Gun Street Girl revolves around an apparently simple murder/suicide which begins to look much less simple, and Duffy is again drawn into complex political waters. To say more would be more of a spoiler than I would have wanted before I read the book, and anyway the chief pleasures of these books for me aren't the plots. What McKinty does really well are the characters he portrays, the engaging narrative voice of the flawed but fundamentally decent Duffy and the superb sense of time and place he generates. He is also ingenious at weaving his stories around real events of Northern Ireland during The Troubles and (to this non-expert, at least) gives a very good sense of what things were like then. All of these are again excellently done and kept me gripped throughout - and the plot, too, is rather more credible than in some of the previous books, where I have found them a little overblown.

I enjoyed this book a lot, and I think the Duffy series is shaping up to be a very significant addition to the detective canon. This is thoughtful, readable and gripping, and probably the best of the series so far. Warmly recommended.

This is another very good novel from Adrian McKinty. Set in Northern Ireland in 1985, it is the fourth in his series featuring Sean Duffy, a CID inspector in the RUC. It is helpful to have read the first three but certainly not essential and this stands perfectly well on its own.

The plot of Gun Street Girl revolves around an apparently simple murder/suicide which begins to look much less simple, and Duffy is again drawn into complex political waters. To say more would be more of a spoiler than I would have wanted before I read the book, and anyway the chief pleasures of these books for me aren't the plots. What McKinty does really well are the characters he portrays, the engaging narrative voice of the flawed but fundamentally decent Duffy and the superb sense of time and place he generates. He is also ingenious at weaving his stories around real events of Northern Ireland during The Troubles and (to this non-expert, at least) gives a very good sense of what things were like then. All of these are again excellently done and kept me gripped throughout - and the plot, too, is rather more credible than in some of the previous books, where I have found them a little overblown.

I enjoyed this book a lot, and I think the Duffy series is shaping up to be a very significant addition to the detective canon. This is thoughtful, readable and gripping, and probably the best of the series so far. Warmly recommended.