If these hot summer days have you wishing for a cooler, if not less humid environment and your imagination runs to the dark side of the street, I may have a few books for you. The darkness of the Irish soul is a much-remarked-upon aspect of the national psyche, so get your black Celt on for these selections:
Ken Bruen has spent the last decade or so writing the Jack Taylor novels, of which Green Hell is the latest. Taylor rescues an American grad student from a beating and gets an unwanted biographer/sidekick. When the grad student gets arrested, Taylor gets some help from a human chameleon who takes care of more than one problem. Aging, addicted, violent Jack Taylor may seem hard to like, but it's a bit like what would happen if you crossed Hunter S. Thompson with the Punisher. Galway never seemed so grimy in these compulsively readable mysteries.
In The Rage, Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey is considering perjuring himself to get justice in the courts in post-Celtic-tiger Dublin. In the meantime, a recently released convict figures out how to rob armored trucks and a retired nun makes a call to Tidey about a suspicious car. Violence ensues. Ruminations on the financial crash and the long shadows cast by the Catholic Church and its scandals add to the intricate plot told in spare prose by Gene Kerrigan.
First-time novelist Jeremy Massey strikes a slightly lighter tone with The Last Four Days of Paddy Buckley. Buckley is an undertaker, and after a late-night pickup, forgets to turn his headlights on and kills a pedestrian who turns out to be the brother of the most notorious gangster in Ireland. Fleeing the scene, Buckley is soon called upon to minister to the bereaved gangster without blowing his own cover. Buckley also gets sexually involved with a widow who promptly drops dead and whose family also chooses his establishment to handle the arrangements. Violence, dark humor and a certain amount of sentiment make this suspenseful noir tale a winner.
While a little dated, Dublin Noir (subtitled The Celtic Tiger Vs. The Ugly American) is a great way to discover other mystery and thriller writers, both Irish and otherwise. Having won all the major crime novel and mystery awards between them, these writers dig into the seamy underbelly of the thousand-plus-year-old city in these short selections.
Add a comment to: Irish Noir