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WORK TITLE: Trespass
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.anthonyjquinnwriter.com/
CITY: County Tyrone
STATE:
COUNTRY: Ireland
NATIONALITY: Irish
Married to wife Clare and has four children.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; wife’s name Clare; children: four.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, journalist, short-story writer, and educator.
AWARDS:Artists Career Enhancement Bursary, Northern Ireland Arts Council, 2014; Northern Ireland Libraries Writer in Residence, 2016.
WRITINGS
Contributor to newspapers, including the Irish News and Irish Times.
SIDELIGHTS
Anthony J. Quinn is a Northern Irish writer, novelist, and journalist. He is also a short-story writer whose works have twice been listed for a Hennessy/New Irish Writing Award, Quinn said on the Anthony J. Quinn Website. He has been the Northern Ireland Libraries Writer-in-Residence and received an ACES bursary for literature from the Northern Ireland Arts Council.
Quinn grew up during the time in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles, or the Northern Ireland Conflict. The conflict spanned the years from 1968 to 1998, and consisted of a “thirty year bout of political violence, low intensity armed conflict and political deadlock within the six north-eastern counties of Ireland that formed part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,” commented John Dorney, writing on the website Irish Story. “Growing up during the Troubles, I wanted to run, but instead I remained rooted to the spot, in my home parish of Killeeshil in Tyrone, about three miles from the Border with Monaghan. By staying here and raising a family, I’ve managed to lift my childhood landscape out of the darkness of the past,” Quinn stated in the Irish Times.
Disappeared
The Troubles and the effects of this period frequently serves as integral part of the background in Quinn’s fiction. In Disappeared, Quinn introduces series character Celcius Daly, a detective inspector working in Northern Ireland. Ireland has emerged from the Troubles, but many within the country still vividly remember the violence and turmoil, the political and religious divisions, and the conflicts between the IRA and the British army. A Catholic himself, Daly understands the difficulties facing someone of his religion in a predominantly Protestant country.
In his opening case, Daly is dispatched to investigate a gruesome murder on a lonely island in Lough Neagh. There, he finds the body of Joseph Devine, an old man whose has been cruelly killed. During Daly’s investigation, he finds that Devine was a clerk at a legal firm representing Irish Republicans. However, he was also an informer for the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the police force of Northern Ireland. Daly must find out not only what Devine knew that would motivate someone to kill him, but who was sufficiently afraid of the information he had to resort to murder. Irish Examiner reviewer Declan Burke observed, “An eye for vividly contrasting imagery means that Disappeared is superbly evocative of its bleak setting.” Burke called the novel “Downbeat, bracingly pragmatic, beautifully written and steeped in the genre’s lore.”
Border Angels and Silence
In the second Daly mystery, Border Angels, Daly investigates a case that involves human trafficking of women from Eastern Europe who are put to work as prostitutes in the border zone between the north and south of Ireland. When pimp takes one of the women for a ride, the car explodes, killing the pimp but, apparently, leaving the woman alive. The woman’s footprints, leading away from the accident scene, give Daly little to go on, but he becomes obsessed with finding out who she was and where she was going.
Silence brings Daly into contact with a special intelligence unit that recruits new members through violent methods. Later, he investigates the death of a priest whose car skidded off the roadway in the rain. He notes that there were no signs that the priest tried to stop the car, raising questions about what really happened. In this installment, the information Daly uncovers extends back to the time of the Troubles and brings those difficult days into modern awareness. “If you want the philosophy of the Troubles, and some of the reality, you’ll get it here,” commented Jane Hardy, writing in the Irish News. Reviewer Barry Forshaw, writing in the London Independent, called Silence a “beautifully written example of how enriching a novel can be if the author does not for a second neglect the importance of locale.”
Trespass, Undertow, and The Blood Dimmed Tide
Trespass is the “fourth of the masterfully written Celcius Daly novels,” commented Booklist contributor Jane Murphy. Daly works to find a missing ten-year-old boy, who locals believe has been kidnapped by Travelers, a largely itinerant group of ethnic Irish who have long lived at the margins of society. During his investigation, Daly uncovers a connection between the boy’s disappearance and the unsolved mystery of a Traveler woman’s disappearance during the Troubles. The woman was suspected of being an IRA informer, and the case quickly takes on unexpected political weight. Throughout the novel, Quinn “offers moments of fine, even lyrical writing,” observed a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Murphy remarked that “readers who relish that Celtic edge” in their mystery and detective fiction “will not want to miss this one.” An Internet Bookwatch reviewer called the novel a “deftly crafted and inherently riveting read from cover to cover,” while a Publishers Weekly reviewer found it to be “darkly immersive on many levels.”
Undertow, the fifth appearance of Inspector Daly, takes the toughened detective across the border to Dreesh, a village where residents owe allegiance only to a local crime boss and where the normal rules of society are ignored. This time, he encounters violent smugglers, corrupt and disgraced police officers, unreliable informers, and people who believe the Irish border isn’t as definitive as most believe. The suicide investigation that brought him to Dreesh puts him in greater danger than he expected. The novel also considers some of the more common issues present in a borderland area, such as how citizens cross the border every day for work and how the border affects the attitudes and identities of those living on both sides of the divide. Eventually, Quinn stated in the Irish News, Quinn “comes to realize that there never was ‘a hard border’ between the Republic and Northern Ireland in the sense of a static line or barrier. Instead, the border has existed as something much more restless and porous, a blurred zone of dead-ends and fleeting corridors that offer different limits and opportunities to criminals, police, and the ordinary people trying to live pragmatically in its shadow.”
Quinn is also the author of other novels outside of the “Celcius Daly” series. The Blood Dimmed Tide is a historical supernatural mystery featuring celebrated Irish writer and poet W. B. Yeats. When the body of an Irish girl washes ashore in her coffin, Yeats finds himself haunted by her spirit. To put the spirit to rest, Yeats and his protege Charles Adams head back to Ireland from England to find out the girl’s identity and solve the question of what happened to her.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 15, 2017, Jane Murphy, review of Trespass, p. 29.
Financial Times, December 15, 2017, Barry Forshaw, review of Undertow.
Independent (London, England), December 27, 2015, Barry Forshaw, review of Silence.
Internet Bookwatch, January, 2018, review of Trespass.
Irish Examiner, June 13, 2015, Declan Burke, review of Disappeared.
Irish News, January 21, 2016, Jane Hardy, review of Silence.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2017, review of Trespass.
Mid-Ulster Mail, February 26, 2016, “Tyrone Crime Fiction Author and Journalist Anthony J. Quinn Picked as Northern Ireland Libraries Writer in Residence.”
Publishers Weekly, September 4, 2017, review of Trespass, p. 64.
Xpress Reviews, November 3, 2017, Susan Clifford Braun, review of Trespass.
ONLINE
Anthony J. Quinn Website, http://www.anthonyjquinnwriter.com (May 7, 2018).
Crime Time, http://www.crimetime.co.uk/ (November 14, 2017), review of Undertow.
Euro Crime, http://eurocrime.blogspot.com/ (December 9, 2015), Lynn Harvey, review of Silence.
Irish Story Website, http://www.theirishstory.com/ (February 9, 2015), John Dorney, “The Northern Ireland Conflict 1968-1998—An Overview.”
eries
Inspector Celcius Daly
1. Disappeared (2012)
2. Border Angels (2012)
3. Silence (2015)
4. Trespass (2016)
5. Undertow (2017)
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W B Yeats
1. The Blood Dimmed Tide (2014)
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Novels
Blind Arrows (2015)
The Listeners (2018)
The blight of the Border and Brexit’s toxic threat
While the shape of a new Border approaching with Brexit is not yet visible, after all the outrages of the Troubles – plus smuggling – what new crimes will emerge in its shadows?
Sat, Dec 16, 2017, 06:00
Anthony Quinn
Author Anthony J Quinn at a Border blocade
Author Anthony J Quinn at a Border blocade
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Growing up during the Troubles, I wanted to run, but instead I remained rooted to the spot, in my home parish of Killeeshil in Tyrone, about three miles from the Border with Monaghan. By staying here and raising a family, I’ve managed to lift my childhood landscape out of the darkness of the past. The trees and rivers I played in as a boy with my brothers and sisters live on in my children’s world, their familiar sounds and images translated into new stories and adventures.
However, my children think I grew up somewhere else, in a grim terrain of checkpoints and military hardware, armed men in camouflage greens, bulletproof vests and balaclavas. To their generation, the Border exists not as a line on a map, but as a contradictory series of romantic recollections about smuggling and horror stories from the Troubles. They’ve never noticed the Border, which runs so invisibly close to their lives, and they’ve never been able to locate these stories in their own landscape. For the past 15 years or so, the Border has existed more as folklore, and in the crevices of the past, until its story took an unexpected turn in June 2016 when the UK made a political decision about immigration and voted for Brexit.
Then it was as if the Border had suddenly fallen upon us from the sky again.
My granduncle Thomas Daly, to whom I’ve dedicated my latest novel Undertow, would have been 14, about the same age as my eldest daughter is now, when the Border was first created. He farmed the field I now live on, and I remember visiting his three-room cottage as a child nearly every day. He was a devoutly prayerful man, and I was in dread of calling at the start of the evening rosary. (He usually dedicated the third round of Hail Marys to the conversion of China.) I remember his open hearth fire billowing turf smoke and a candle constantly burning under the picture of the Sacred Heart. His cottage had no electricity or tap water, but it was filled with the sweet nostalgic simmering of the Ireland de Valera had envisaged on the other side of the Border.
By the time I left home to go to university in Belfast, my granduncle had suffered several strokes. He was in his eighties and a tough old survivor, but his mind and body had begun to fail him. He hated hospitals and nursing homes, so my mother, a nurse, decided to move him into my old bedroom. There, cared for by her and my sisters, he confronted death as he had confronted everything in his life, with patience and prayer, a professional rosary-reciter to the end.
During his final illness, I would leave Belfast and go back to Killeeshil, heading out on a Saturday night with my friends and dancing to the Smiths and the Cure, then returning home slightly drunk to share a bedroom with my bed-ridden granduncle, his wheelchair and his commode. At the time, the solemnity of the sleeping arrangements suited my slightly morbid frame of mind. Never again has the boundary between sleep and death felt so thin.
One night, as I tripped home a little later than usual, I sensed some sort of commotion as soon as I opened the bedroom door. I saw the untidy blankets and my granduncle’s agitation; his haunted eyes as he whispered to himself in some sort of delirium. When he saw me, he disentangled his hand from the bedclothes and beckoned me closer, his voice rising with anxiety. At first, I couldn’t fix the context of his monologue. Amid his ramblings, I made out stories about herds of livestock and other contraband smuggled in the dead of night across the Border, the sums of money involved and the threat of customs men and the RUC with their secret patrols. Did he think I was someone he had known years ago? Or had he, in his confusion, mistaken me for a person of authority, perhaps even a priest. My sudden appearance in the room (like a true Smiths fan dressed completely in black) must have summoned a guilty memory. This wasn’t a dream terror, I suspected, it was a panicky confession.
To my shame, I held my tongue. I shouldn’t have but I did. I should have reminded him of who I was, his 19-year-old grandnephew, not a priest or an old friend, but I was tired and a little annoyed at the inconvenience of having a sick relative in my bedroom. Part of me wanted to get to sleep, but another part of me felt compelled to silently imitate the ghosts in the room, intrigued by the sound of these tales I could never have imagined hearing from my granduncle’s pious lips.
Later, I felt guilty that I did not make him stop. In my defence, the words had tumbled from his tongue as soon as I entered the room, and they were the truth. I sat on my bed in the opposite corner and listened, keeping vigil as he whispered, feeling the secrets of history well up in the room.
I remember his voice growing shrill with nervousness as he recounted a particularly dangerous smuggling operation – as a young man he had helped a neighbour drive a large herd of pigs through mud and darkness along a hidden Border lane, the yelping of the pigs injecting an extra degree of fear as they tried to avoid an ambush by customs men or the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
This was a secret story about survival and law-breaking and my granduncle’s place in the world, a cowboy-like story about bad times, a story from a dangerous frontier. It transformed him into a youthful adventurer and a risk-taker, but here he was in his old age seeking some form of peace and forgiveness from his past.
I watched him, sunk low in his bed, his face pale and confused. That this extremely gentle-mannered and religious man could have been capable of such daring law-breaking was part of the distorting logic of Border country. In his way, my granduncle had been part of a quiet war waged against the Border, fought by daughters and wives, husbands and sons across the disputed territory of Ulster. People of his generation moved livestock, tea, butter, sugar, alcohol, and tobacco, anything that had a sufficient price deferential or scarcity to make smuggling worth the risk. This surreptitious battle to get one over on the authorities raged on for decades until the Troubles took the battle to a new and darker stage.
To my 19-year-old mind, my granduncle’s troubled monologue had little meaning or symbolism beyond that of a thrilling smuggling story told in the middle of the night. I didn’t realise it then, but his ramblings whispered a secret message in my ear, one that I’m grasping only now, after having written five novels set along the Border.
This decades-old memory represented in my granduncle’s failing mind the worst degree of catastrophe imaginable: the darkness of the Border; the overpowering fear of being caught; the danger of losing control of the distressed pigs. In his story, he had avoided detection and made it home safely. But the writer in me now suspects the opposite. The Border had not been deceived that night, in spite of his best efforts. Its darkness and mire had swallowed him whole so that years later he would lie in his sickbed in mortal fear of being sucked down into its moral abyss.
His story was a symbol, the scope of which cannot be clearly defined, the extent of lawlessness along the Border, the way Partition had set the Catholics of the North adrift. My granduncle’s generation had carried on with their lives as normal, but many of them were left untethered, without a sense of loyalty to either jurisdiction or a civic sense of responsibility. The intrusive bureaucracy of the Border made them feel rebellious, and encouraged them to behave as they felt, like outlaws. Life was harsh, and the temptation to hustle a living from the Border was too strong. What was the shame in a little smuggling, exploiting transient economic and tax differences or a loophole in the regulations?
The Border and the issues of right and wrong assailed my granduncle in his senility. He had taken financial advantage of the Border like most of his generation, but did that make his actions a sin? If so, what other transgressions needed to be acknowledged? What else had the people of the Border kept their mouths shut about? Was pretending to ignore the Border like pretending to ignore the IRA volunteers in our midst? But we were Catholics living in a dangerous republican heartland and for years we didn’t have the liberty to speak about these things.
My granduncle was a right-thinking man who thought he had done wrong. What about the other type of person who lived in the shadow of the Border? The wrong-doer who thought he was always in the right, the paramilitaries, and organised smuggling gangs, the men and women of violence who ran in the shadows. I shudder to think what his finely-tuned conscience would have made of the illegality spawned by the Border in the intervening years – the wholesale laundering of fuel, the agricultural subsidy fraud, the illegal landfill sites and people trafficking, the contaminated meat processed at illegal abattoirs, the dubious property deals and the individuals boasting about doing the quadruple (working and claiming unemployment benefits on both sides of the Border), not to mention the IRA’s shooting and bombing campaigns.
I’ve traced these crimes through my detective novels, the rot that set into society because of the Border, the moral and civil decline that started in my grandfather’s day and has accelerated ever since. The Border was about more than checkpoints, fortified police stations and a sudden deterioration in the road surface, it signalled a distortion in the psyche and the moral view.
When I look south from my home in Killeeshil to the high dark-blue hills tantalisingly hiding Monaghan and the rest of the Republic of Ireland, I think of the new Border that is approaching with Brexit, the one that has been in progress for 18 months now, but is still shrouded in mystery. I dread to think of the new crimes that will emerge in its shadows.
Undertow by Anthony J Quinn is published this week by Head of Zeus, at £18.99
Tyrone crime fiction author and journalist Anthony J Quinn picked as Northern Ireland Libraries Writer in Residence Published: 13:01 Friday 26 February 2016 Share this article Tyrone crime fiction author and journalist Anthony J Quinn has been chosen as Libraries Northern Ireland writer-in-residence for 2016. Quinn, whose debut novel Disappeared was selected by the Times and the Daily Mail as one of the best books of the year, will take up the top literary post as part of the libraries’ Creativity Month celebrations. One of his first engagements will be a reading from his latest work in Cookstown Library at 1pm this Friday (March 4). In addition, the award winning Dungannon author will be facilitating writing workshops, seminars, manuscript clinics and readings in a host of libraries across Northern Ireland. He will also be providing regular updates in a blog about the craft of writing. Quinn said he was delighted to have been picked for the residency. “I remember going to the old Dungannon library in Scotch Street when I was 7, and picking three new books every month. I wasn’t old enough to join, but my mother let me use her card, sacrificing her own quota. My parents always encouraged me to read, and this is one of the greatest gifts a parent can give a child. I remember the joy of seeing a book in a series that I had not yet read, especially the Enid Blyton adventures. Libraries not only touch our minds but also our lives in very fundamental ways “Those books defined my childhood. Libraries not only touch our minds but also our lives in very fundamental ways. Getting the writer-in-residence post is a wonderful honour. I’m looking forward to visiting as many libraries as possible and sharing what I know about the world of writing and hopefully inspiring local readers to some literary success. Libraries are the hubs of our creative communities and should be celebrated as such.” Quinn’s latest novel, Silence, the third in the best-selling Celcius Daly detective series was described by the Sunday Times as ‘a magnificent meditation on the corrosive legacy of the Troubles’ and the Sunday Express as one of the best crime novels of the season. The Independent praised it as ‘hypnotically expressive...an irresistible crime drama’, and the Irish News picked it as their book of the week. “Although Silence excavates the murky details of those very troubled times, it also functions as an entertaining detective thriller”, said Anthony. “In a way that is the most generous thing you can do as a writer, to entertain your readers, and somehow encourage them to examine the sort of thing they would normally turn away from in their normal lives. “The subject matter of Silence is so compelling, yet also so disturbing that I wanted to run away from it many times. However, I’m glad I stuck with it.” Quinn said landscape was the key to his books, especially that of Tyrone, with its geography of moods and interweave of light and darkness. “I take a guilty pleasure in drawing the reader’s attention to the strangeness of the local landscape, making them shudder at a gruesome-looking blackthorn tree, a rotting cottage, or a treacherous bog. I want readers to feel the dark gravity of the border countryside, its mesh of twisting roads, the sense that out there amid the blackthorn thickets and swirling mists, loose bits of the past are still wriggling their way through the shadows.” Quinn’s five novels have received international acclaim, with the book critics of the Washington Post, the LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle shortlisting his work for a Strand Literary Award. In 2014, he was awarded an Artists Career Enhancement Bursary by the NI Arts Council. For more information visit www.anthonyjquinnwriter.com
Read more at: https://www.midulstermail.co.uk/news/tyrone-crime-fiction-author-and-journalist-anthony-j-quinn-picked-as-northern-ireland-libraries-writer-in-residence-1-7233068
Anthony J. Quinn is an Irish writer and journalist. His debut novel Disappeared was selected as a Times Book of the Year 2014 and led the Daily Mail to mark Quinn as a 'star in the making'. His short stories have twice been shortlisted for a Hennessy/New Irish Writing award. Blind Arrows is the second in a series of three historical novels set in Ireland during WWI and the War of Independence. It follows The Blood-Dimmed Tide, a stunning piece of historical fiction with WB Yeats as its main protagonist. He lives in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.
Crime writer Anthony J Quinn tells why he's drawn to the border
Interest in the border isn't just a recent phenomenon – since its creation almost a century ago it has rarely been out of the news or the consciousness of people who live near it and cross it. With a new crime book set around on border published this month, novelist Anthony Quinn writes of its peculiar pull
Tyrone author Anthony Quinn: "I’ve grown to love intensely this bleak tract of the Ulster landscape on my doorstep" Picture: Mal McCann.
Anthony J Quinn
30 November, 2017 01:00
Topics
Celcius Daly Head of Zeus Irish crime fiction Tyrone author Undertow
Undertow is "a spy thriller of sorts and also a meditation on the social and psychological effects of the Irish border"
GROWING up along the border during the Troubles, I wanted to run away but somehow I've remained rooted to the spot, living now at the edge of the Tyrone farm that I was born on.
During my mid-30s, I gave up all idea of leaving and started writing a series of detective novels set in the landscape I had known from childhood, of which Undertow is the fifth. It's a spy thriller of sorts and also a meditation on the social and psychological effects of the Irish border.
At this stage of my life, I fear I know too little of the rest of the world to set my fiction anywhere else. However, I've grown to love intensely this bleak tract of the Ulster landscape on my doorstep, a terrain creaking and gurgling with treacherous bogland and thorn thickets, where, in my imagination, dubious spies and haunted detectives come and go in the mist like ghosts.
Undertow steers away from the broader political and military tensions of the region and focuses on the personal betrayals induced in a group of tense and doomed police detectives working in parallel along both sides of the border. I was inspired by the fact that for decades many of my neighbours, UK citizens living in Northern Ireland, have been travelling across the border daily to go to work, and vice versa.
Some of them were police officers living in one jurisdiction, and working in another, British nationals who wore the policing emblem of a different country, who carried two passports and operated in a murky twilight of national identity, one crammed with flags and history and gloomy gangs of marching men and women.
I was intrigued by the sense of estrangement this repeated act of crossing the border might create in a detective figure, especially one who falls unwittingly into a trap set by his colleagues and ends up a drowning victim on the shores of Lough Neagh.
My hero, Inspector Celcius Daly, is charged with unravelling the net of betrayal and discovers plenty of grist for the mill of suspicion and paranoia constantly grinding within his soul.
Over the series, Daly has grown into the puzzled detective-in-chief of the border's labyrinth, accused by his police superiors of spending more time there than is healthy, of populating the landscape with his own demons. On his trips criss-crossing the border, he usually ends up lost on by-roads meandering into bogland or pondering the ruin of a rotting cottage at the end of a dark lane, his attempts to track down the enigmatic spy Robert Hunter petering out in dead-ends and the shells of abandoned police stations.
Moving and thinking in this darkness, Daly comes to realise that there never was ‘a hard border' between the Republic and Northern Ireland in the sense of a static line or barrier. Instead, the border has existed as something much more restless and porous, a blurred zone of dead-ends and fleeting corridors that offer different limits and opportunities to criminals, police, and the ordinary people trying to live pragmatically in its shadow.
:: Undertow by Anthony J Quinn, published by Head of Zeus, will be launched at Waterstones, Belfast, on Thursday December 14 at 6.30pm. Admission free.
I'm an Irish writer and journalist. My debut novel Disappeared was shortlisted for a Strand Literary Award in the United States. It was also listed by Kirkus Reviews as one of the top ten thrillers of 2012. After its UK publication in 2014, Disappeared was selected by the Daily Mail and the Times as one of the best novels of the year. It was also long-listed for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. My short stories have twice been shortlisted for a Hennessy/New Irish Writing award. In 2014, I was awarded an ACES bursary for literature from the Northern Ireland Arts Council, and in 2016 I was Northern Ireland Libraries Writer-in-Residence. I live in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, with my wife, Clare, and our four children. I am represented by Paul Feldstein of the Feldstein Literary Agency.
Trespass
Jane Murphy
Booklist. 114.2 (Sept. 15, 2017): p29.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Trespass.
By Anthony J. Quinn.
Nov. 2017. 336p. Pegasus, $25.95 (9781681775500).
This is the fourth of the masterfully written Celcius Daly novels (after Silence, 2016). Daly is a Catholic detective inspector in Northern Ireland. While investigating a boy's disappearance, he uncovers ties to the era of the Troubles and the disappearance of Mary O'Sullivan, a young traveler (or gypsy), and her baby in the border country, reportedly at the hands of a violent paramilitary group. He digs deeply into an organized-crime syndicate within the O'Sullivan gypsy clan. Their secret must be chopped out of the frozen sea of secrets at the heart of the nations painful history. Northern Ireland, Quinn suggests, is a country in which many are still held hostage by the ghosts of the past. In the remarkable opening sequence, a dreaming man dances torturously through a Dante-like inferno, while Daly waltzes alone in a purgatory all his own. A decent man and a dedicated law officer, he is considering moving on, but he, too, remains unable to break free from disturbing memories of his family's history and their land. His personal troubles, unsettling details about his fellow officers and the victim's family, and an enlightening look at the travelers and their wandering ways unfold in carefully wrought, often lyrical prose, always rich with foreboding. The ending is somewhat surprising and totally satisfying. Fans of Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville, in particular as well as all readers who relish that Celtic edge, will not want to miss this one.--Jane Murphy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Murphy, Jane. "Trespass." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2017, p. 29. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A507359868/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d3f042f5. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A507359868
Trespass
Publishers Weekly. 264.36 (Sept. 4, 2017): p64.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Trespass
Anthony J. Quinn. Pegasus Crime, $25.95
(336p) ISBN 978-1-68177-550-0
Set largely in the border country between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, Quinn's uneven fourth mystery featuring Insp. Celcius Daly (after 2015 's Silence) chronicles the embattled Belfast police detective's struggle to find a missing 10-year-old boy, who has allegedly been abducted by Travellers. Daly quickly finds himself in a politically precarious investigation after he unearths connections between the boy's disappearance and an decades-old unsolved mystery concerning a missing Traveller woman who was suspected of being an IRA informer during the Troubles. Powered by relentlessly bleak atmospherics and symbolism, this story is darkly immersive on many levels. Quinn's exploration of the hidden war being waged over the purchase of property on the border is intriguing, as is the secretive culture of the Travellers, a nomadic group who survive by navigating ancient routes through the wilderness. But there's an emotional numbness to the narrative--particularly in Daly's characterization--that gives the book a detached and almost indifferent feel that dulls the story's impact. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Trespass." Publishers Weekly, 4 Sept. 2017, p. 64. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505468053/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=08383ea4. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505468053
Quinn, Anthony J.: TRESPASS
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Quinn, Anthony J. TRESPASS Pegasus Crime (Adult Fiction) $25.95 11, 7 ISBN: 978-1-68177-550-0
A kidnapping case in Northern Ireland threatens to unearth long-buried secrets.At the beginning of Quinn's latest inspector Celcius Daly mystery (Silence, 2015, etc.), Samuel Reid, an old farmer, receives a visitor who has new questions about an unsolved murder from the time of the Troubles. A few days later a boy is kidnapped outside a courthouse in bustling modern Belfast. Called upon to investigate the boy's disappearance, Daly starts to suspect that the two cases may be linked. Someone wants to bring the past to light. Someone else wants to keep it hidden. It's a common conflict in the history of Northern Ireland--and in detective novels. At his best, Quinn offers moments of fine, even lyrical writing, as when the details of Daly's old cases are "fixed at a remove" in his mind "like half-submerged buoys in a fog-bound sea." Unfortunately, he is less inventive when it comes to his characters and themes. Celcius Daly is divorced, middle-aged, a loner, haunted by the past, good at his job but "prickly and exasperating" in the estimation of his colleagues and superiors. Readers have met this kind of detective more than once before. And while the idea that past crimes are never really dead and buried certainly has resonance in Belfast, mystery writers from Los Angeles to Tokyo have said much the same thing. This detective novel about the inescapability of history is itself trapped in the past of the genre.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Quinn, Anthony J.: TRESPASS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192379/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=885c6366. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192379
Quinn, Anthony J. Trespass: An Inspector Celcius Daly Mystery
Susan Clifford Braun
Xpress Reviews. (Nov. 3, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
[STAR]Quinn, Anthony J. Trespass: An Inspector Celcius Daly Mystery. Pegasus Crime. Nov. 2017. 336p. ISBN 9781681775500. $25.95; ebk. ISBN 9781681776026. MYS
Irish detective Celcius Daly is investigating the abduction of a young boy, the son of a colleague. The lad was snatched from his mother's car by a group of travelers under investigation for various crimes on both sides of the Irish border. Daly suspects it has something to do with the boy's father's dodgy writing assignment undercover in the travelers' community. His fellow officers are strangely standoffish and unwilling to help.
Forced to confront the leader of the clan alone, Daly uncovers the secret to a long unsolved murder and learns more than he ever wanted to know about the lawlessness along the edgy borders of an Ireland still smarting from the Troubles. The end is shocking but thoroughly satisfying!
Verdict Irish crime novelist Quinn (Disappeared) is a writer to watch. His prose is careful, rich, dense, and full of Celtic edge, and Quinn's insights into the world of the vagabond travelers adds much depth and atmosphere. Fans of Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville will love it. Highly recommended. --Susan Clifford Braun, Bainbridge Island, WA
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Braun, Susan Clifford. "Quinn, Anthony J. Trespass: An Inspector Celcius Daly Mystery." Xpress Reviews, 3 Nov. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515795915/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c9c3f60b. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A515795915
Trespass
Anthony J. Quinn
Internet Bookwatch. (Jan. 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
Trespass
Anthony J. Quinn
Pegasus Books
80 Broad Street, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10004
www.pegasusbooks.com
9781681775500, $25.95, HC, 336pp, www.amazon.com
Detective Celcius Daly is investigating the abduction of a boy by a group of travelers already under investigation for smuggling and organized crime. As he digs into the child's background, he discovers a family secret linked to an unsolved crime during The Troubles--the disappearance of a young woman and her baby. Daly's investigation shakes loose some harrowing truths about the lawlessness of Northern Ireland's border country. Undergoing an internal investigation over his handling of the search for IRA spy Daniel Hegarty, Daly soon finds himself entangled in a vigilante mission, discovering just how far a group of outsiders will go to find their own justice. A deftly crafted and inherently riveting read from cover to cover, "Trespass" is another narrative driven mystery by a master of the genre and unreservedly recommended, especially for community library Mystery/Suspense collections. It should be noted for the personal reading lists of dedicated mystery buffs that "Trespass" (an Inspector Celcius Daly Mystery) is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $12.99).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Quinn, Anthony J. "Trespass." Internet Bookwatch, Jan. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526574221/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ba19c1a7. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526574221
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Short review: Undertow by Anthony J Quinn
A suicide case takes detective Celcius Daly across the Irish border in this astringent examination of betrayal and schism
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Barry Forshaw DECEMBER 15, 2017 Print this page0
A suicide case takes detective Celcius Daly across the Irish border to the benighted village of Dreesh — a place that operates by its own laws under the malign presiding influence of a crime chief with connections to the IRA. Daly finds himself in a maelstrom of smugglers, informers, disgraced coppers and even a dispute over the limits of the Irish border.
Quinn’s novels featuring his detective Daly see the saturnine sleuth all too aware of his own unhappy Catholic past, but forcing himself to be concerned with the less abstract guilt of others.
Finely honed though the plotting is, Quinn’s greatest skill is the evocation of the landscape of his country matched with an astringent examination of betrayal and schism, inextricably linked with the Ireland of the Troubles.
Undertow, by Anthony J Quinn, Head of Zeus, RRP£18.99, 309 pages
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WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 09, 2015
Review: Silence by Anthony J Quinn
Silence by Anthony J Quinn, November 2015, 320 pages, Head of Zeus, ISBN: 1784971235
Reviewed by Lynn Harvey.
(Read more of Lynn's reviews for Euro Crime here.)
The motorway cut through a narrow valley, and Daly crossed a bridge. He glanced through his side window, and saw the old country below, felt its dark gravity, its mesh of forgotten roads, its interlocking parishes of grief and murder.
South Armagh, 1974.
During the rain's onslaught the group of policemen in waterproof overalls continue their task at the river's edge: a rhythmical plunging of their prisoner into the waters, hauling him out, interrogating, pressing him back down. Finally a gun is placed against the half-drowned man's neck. Then its muzzle is brought round to face him and the trigger is pulled. Click, no bullet. They drag him out of the water, dump him on the mud, and retreat to their Land Rover. After a pause they drive away. Shaken, cold and confused, the young man staggers through a thorn thicket towards the road when a voice tells him how lucky he has been that day. A man steps forward from the trees and introduces himself as a recruiting agent for a special intelligence unit. Explaining that “we must all choose carefully the gangs we join”, he offers the young man money, training, and protection for the his parents in these difficult times.
February, 2013.
The call comes whilst Inspector Celcius Daly is preparing for bed. A fatal car crash on the new motorway. Daly arrives to find the familiar sight of police tape and flash-lights. Figures walk to and fro amongst the heavy digging equipment as a police officer explains that they were called out by reports of diggers being vandalised. They found the diversion signs and traffic cones rearranged, leading towards a drop of some thirty feet, so they set up a cordon and were replacing the cones when an elderly driver, Father Aloysius Walsh, drew up. For some reason he took fright and drove off again at high speed. He followed the misplaced cones and was killed when his car went over the edge into the bushes below.
Daly walks through the watching police and down the thorny slope to the crashed car. He notes that there are no skid marks on the road, no attempt to brake on the part of the elderly priest. He studies the body, fascinated by the ragged bundle of rosary beads and holy charms in the priest's dead hand which speak to Daly's own Catholic upbringing. He looks up at this point and spots a man who turns to face the light of his torch, Detective Irwin of Special Branch, a man always hovering at the edge of his investigations. Stopping for petrol on his way home down the rural lanes, Daly asks if there is a holy well in the area. The garage man's answer is hostile but Celcius Daly is used to it, born and raised a rural Catholic, now part of the “modern, integrated” Police Force of Northern Ireland, hostility is something he knows about …
SILENCE is Anthony J Quinn's third “Celcius Daly” novel and his protagonist, Daly, is that familiar, necessary figure for readers of crime fiction – the “loner” detective. Celcius Daly is a divorced, rural-born detective who has returned to live in his childhood home, an isolated, lakeside cottage. He is a man still unsure of his place in the modern Police Service of Northern Ireland. The central crime of Quinn's previous novel, BORDER ANGELS, was the very contemporary one of sex-trafficking but the manipulated, violent past of Quinn's border country is never far away in his fiction and with SILENCE we return to that ground. A car crash kills an elderly priest from a Belfast abbey and the priest's obsessional research into a series of callous sectarian murders during the Troubles reopens the tragedy of Daly's own childhood – the death of his mother and his father's profound silence about it. Fascinated by a painstaking map with its tangled lines of killings and dates which he finds in the priest's study, Daly is drawn to investigate Father Walsh's death and is led back into a world inhabited by old spies, old spy masters, old hatreds and old crimes.
In SILENCE Quinn acknowledges his fellow Northern Irish writer Stuart Neville's THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST (THE TWELVE (UK)) during a passage of conversation, between Daly and an old informer, about differing responses to the ghosts that haunt a violent past. Quinn's crime writing, well-plotted and threaded with suspense, looks to those same ghosts and while he does not provide Neville's blood-pulsing rides towards thrilling conclusions, Quinn does give us speculations and meditations upon life in that see-saw world. The atmosphere of SILENCE is inseparable from Quinn's rural landscape, filled with forgotten thickets, fields, waterways and ruined cottages. It is a landscape which affords Quinn a retrospective of the equally muddy events of the past from a present still peopled by its ageing protagonists and ghosts. Be prepared for the rain, the mud and the loneliness of Daly as he sits by his peat fire clutching a little black hen. Be prepared for the ever present waters of Lough Neagh and a way of life that is fast disappearing but above all read SILENCE, a grand continuation of Quinn's “Celcius Daly” series.
Lynn Harvey, December 2015
Silence by Anthony J Quinn, book review: An irresistible crime drama that captures the spirit of Belfast
Quinn quickly makes us forget that we have met the likes of solitary detective Celcius Daly a hundred times before
Barry Forshaw Sunday 27 December 2015 13:35 GMT0 comments
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The “Spirit of Place” (or “Genius Loci” as the ancient Romans had it) might be said to hover over the best fiction, literary or otherwise – and the most astute writers are well aware that it is almost as important as a novel’s protagonists. The crime genre has been intermittently cognisant of this fact (look, for instance, at the evocation of California in the novels of Ross Macdonald).
One author who is well aware that this presiding spirit immeasurably enhances his complex crime narratives is the Irish writer Anthony J Quinn, and his latest, Silence, is a beautifully written example of how enriching a novel can be if the author does not for a second neglect the importance of locale. (We can even forgive him that shop-worn title.)
This is the author’s third book featuring his maverick, solitary detective Celcius Daly, and as with the earlier Disappeared and Border Angels, Quinn quickly makes us forget that we have met his like a hundred times before. In fact, there is no single strategy that Quinn uses here to finesse the overfamiliar aspects (we even get the personal involvement of the detective in the case, another stalwart of the genre) – it is the hypnotic expressiveness of the writing that keeps any reservations we might have about the time-honoured conventions at bay; the experience of reading the book is irresistible.
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The novel begins in South Armagh in 1974 with a torture scene in the rain. A squad of policemen repeatedly push a man into a river. But this is a grim induction ceremony – the victim is being recruited for a special intelligence unit. In 2013, after a car crash on a new motorway, Inspector Celcius Daly arrives at the scene to find that traffic signs and cones have been rearranged. The fatality is an ageing priest, Father Walsh, who has been collating evidence concerning brutal mass murder that blighted the borderlands in the 1970s. The rosary beads and charms that the dead priest is clutching remind the detective of his own unhappy Catholic past. Daly discovers that there is a holy well in the area, and what follows shows that the modern police force of Northern Ireland is still obliged to deal with the superstition and dread of a rural past, while a relentless murderer haunts the city of Belfast.
Engrossing though the plot is here, Quinn’s real achievement is in the description of a pastoral landscape with its overgrown waterways and copses, louring skies and the dark waters of Lough Neagh. The detective’s benighted past and the similarly fraught history of Ireland itself are expertly dovetailed in a novel that demonstrates how capacious the crime fiction genre can be.
Order for £10.99 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030
21 January, 2016 01:00
Book Reviews: Anthony J Quinn thriller inspired by Fr Denis Faul
Dean Koontz misses the target with Ashley Bell, a bizarre, rambling and chaotic story
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Silence by Anthony J Quinn, published by Head of Zeus
IN NORTHERN Ireland, the past isn't another country, it inhabits the same tortured terrain as the present. This idea provides Anthony J Quinn with an atmospheric opening to the latest Inspector Celsius Daly thriller, Silence.
As our detective roams border country investigating the death of a priest, a web of murderous intrigue emerges dating back to 1979 and the start of the Troubles – and, in a nice sleight of authorial hand, extends to Daly's own loss of his mother Angela.
The horrors – and there are one or two good killings – are well done but there's a beautiful prose problem in the novel. Quinn likes the pathetic fallacy a bit too much, producing many paragraphs about the wet, wooded landscape. This could clog the action expected in this genre, except that the plot surprises keep coming.
In the end, the explanation of the Armagh "murder triangle" is not about the collusion between the Government and criminal factions in the RUC, but simply what late Fr Walsh called "mean little jealousies".
Silence is dedicated to the late Fr Denis Faul, Quinn's former teacher and headmaster, "whose dogged search for the truth inspired the book", according to the Co Tyrone author.
If you want the philosophy of the Troubles, and some of the reality, you'll get it here.
Jane Hardy
Ashley Bell by Dean Koontz, published in hardback by HarperCollins
AT THE age of 22, university drop-out turned author Bibi Blair is admitted to hospital. At first, doctors think she's had a stroke, but it turns out to be a rare brain cancer, and she's given just months to live.
Overnight, however, after a visit from a golden retriever, she is cured. When she returns home, her parents send her to meet a masseuse-cum-psychic, who, through the medium of Scrabble, divines that Bibi has been spared in order to save the life of someone called Ashley Bell.
Bibi has no idea who or where Ashley is, but sets off to find her, despite receiving a call from a neo-Nazi psychopath who has raped his own mother, and who intends to kill her and Ashley.
Dean Koontz has legions of loyal fans, but even they will struggle with this bizarre, rambling, chaotic story, and he's unlikely to win any new ones.
Catherine Small
Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce, published in hardback by Corsair
CAN you wholeheartedly enjoy something, but find it deeply uncomfortable at the same time? This debut novel by Texas-born Merritt Tierce is proof that, yes, you can.
Barely out of childhood, Marie is already divorced and mum to a little girl she only gets to see on alternate weekends, working – a little too hard – as a waitress to earn a living. But away from the polished silverware and impeccable service, life is a mess of booze, drugs, self-harm and sex.
It's a reckless yet purposeful pattern driven largely by guilt and pain, which Marie manages to hide behind her professionalism at work and 'up for it' reputation socially. As she crashes through life, Tierce's pacey prose pulls you right along with her.
There's no pausing for apologies, or sentimental explanations, and no hero to make everything better. It's an odd contradiction, as a reader, to wish a story was different – for Marie's life to be different – while at the same time lapping up its brilliance.
Abi Jackson
NON-FICTION
SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach To Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver And More Resilient by Jane McGonigal, published by HarperCollins
WE ALL understand the concept of a game – there is a challenge to overcome and you set out to win. Simply put, this is the basis of New York Times bestselling author/researcher Jane McGonigal's book SuperBetter, an innovative guide to achieving life goals in a "gameful" way.
The idea formed after McGonigal suffered a severe concussion and spent long months recovering. Her subsequent research into playing games and how we react to life's stressful situations, such as illness or grief, triggered a fascinating discovery – we can gain mental, emotional, physical, and social resilience by tapping into the same psychological characteristics we display when in game mode.
As McGonigal states in the book, these include self-efficacy, work ethic and determination. The result is a revolutionary concept, explained simply and enthusiastically in SuperBetter, which is well grounded in meticulous research.
Practical and skilfully written, SuperBetter is a compelling read that maps the links between psychology and gameplay, and offers the ideal game plan to help you score.
Mary Ann Pickford
21 January, 2016 01:00 ARTS
Undertow: Anthony J. Quinn talks to Crime Time
Nov 14, 2017
Inspector Celcius Daly and the riddle of the Irish border Growing up along the Irish border during the Troubles, I wanted to run away but somehow I’ve remained rooted to the spot, living now at the edge of the Tyrone farm that I was born on. During my mid-thirties, I gave up all idea of leaving and started writing a series of detective novels set in the landscape I had known from childhood, of which Undertow is the fifth. It’s a spy thriller of sorts and also a meditation on the social and psychological effects of the Irish border. At this stage of my life, I fear I know too little of the rest of the world to set my fiction anywhere else. However, I’ve grown to love intensely this bleak tract of the Ulster landscape on my doorstep, a terrain creaking and gurgling with treacherous bogland and thorn thickets, where, in my imagination, dubious spies and haunted detectives come and go in the mist like ghosts.
Undertow steers away from the broader political and military tensions of the region and focuses on the personal betrayals induced in a group of tense and doomed police detectives working in parallel along both sides of the border. I was inspired by the fact that for decades many of my neighbours, UK citizens living in Northern Ireland, have been travelling across the border daily to go to work, and vice versa. Some of them were police officers living in one jurisdiction, and working in another, British nationals who wore the policing emblem of a different country, who carried two passports and operated in a murky twilight of national identity, one crammed with flags and history and gloomy gangs of marching men and women.
I was intrigued by the sense of estrangement this repeated act of crossing the border might create in a detective figure, especially one who falls unwittingly into a trap set by his colleagues and ends up a drowning victim on the shores of Lough Neagh. My hero, Inspector Celcius Daly, is charged with unravelling the net of betrayal and discovers plenty of grist for the mill of suspicion and paranoia constantly grinding within his soul. Over the series, Daly has grown into the puzzled detective-in-chief of the border’s labyrinth, accused by his police superiors of spending more time there than is healthy, of populating the landscape with his own demons. On his trips criss-crossing the border, he usually ends up lost on by-roads meandering into bogland or pondering the ruin of a rotting cottage at the end of a dark lane, his attempts to track down the enigmatic spy Robert Hunter petering out in dead-ends and the shells of abandoned police stations.
Moving and thinking in this darkness, Daly comes to realise that there never was ‘a hard border’ between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in the sense of a static line or barrier. Instead, the border has existed as something much more restless and porous, a blurred zone of dead-ends and fleeting corridors that offer different limits and opportunities to criminals, police, and the ordinary people trying to live pragmatically in its shadow.
Undertow is publishedby Head of Zeus
Book review: Disappeared
26
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Review: Declan Burke
THE normal standards of right and wrong did not apply to his parishioners,” observes Fr Jack Fee early on in Anthony J Quinn’s Disappeared, “only what was necessary or unnecessary for survival.”
Anthony J Quinn
Head of Zeus €10.99
Set on the mist-shrouded southern shores of Lough Neagh in the post-Troubles era, the events of Disappeared are deeply rooted in Northern Ireland’s recent past, when Fr Fee envisaged “his parish as not so much a sanctuary for a God-fearing flock, but as a no-man’s land between two armies, an arena for IRA ambushes and British Army patrols.”
The lines of conflict may have been sharply defined in Fr Fee’s mind, but it’s in the shadowy cracks between warring forces that Quinn’s novel thrives on.
Inspector Celsius Daly of the newly-created Police Service of Northern Ireland is called to a remote island on Lough Neagh, where he discovers the corpse of Joseph Devine, an old man who has been murdered in a grotesque fashion.
It emerges Devine, a respectable clerk during a long but unremarkable career spent working for a local legal firm that specialised in representing Republicans, was a valuable informer for the RUC’s Special Branch. Who or what was Devine murdered to protect?
First published in the US, and shortlisted there for a Strand Literary Award, Quinn’s debut propels the Tyrone author into the first rank of Irish crime writing.
An eye for vividly contrasting imagery means that Disappeared is superbly evocative of its bleak setting, such as when Daly leaves behind the rural shore of Lough Neagh to drive into Portadown.
“The shapes of trees shining in the frost were like the nerves and arteries of a dissected corpse,” writes Quinn; little more than a paragraph later Daly is contemplating Dalriada Terrace: “The street felt like a dingy holiday resort inhabited by the inmates of a concentration camp.”
Quinn’s seriousness of intent is quickly apparent. This is not a conventional crime novel in the sense that justice delivered ensures a happy-ever-after ending. Celsius Daly is under no illusion the post-Troubles ceasefires have suddenly created a utopia in Northern Ireland.
“We never had an armed struggle,” says Tessa Jordan, the still grieving widow of Oliver Jordan, a young man murdered for being an informer almost two decades previously.
“The whole thing,” she claims, “was a horrible game run by secret agents and psychopaths.” Daly, recently returned to Northern Ireland from Scotland, is no innocent abroad, but he is relatively untainted by the sense of ironic fatalism his colleagues tend to don as armour against futility.
“That was the horror of the ceasefire,” observes one character, “that your perceptions could be so blurred you no longer recognised the terrorist.”
For all his faults — and Celsius Daly is fully aware of the many flaws that make him a plausibly fascinating character — the detective has yet to fully extinguish ‘the distinction he made between good and evil’, or his belief in the necessity of justice, however belatedly it might arrive.
“Perhaps it’s time you learned to live with a little uncertainty,” one of Daly’s colleagues advises, but these words of wisdom, which could serve as a mantra for Northern Ireland’s immediate future, are eventually rejected for a more positive aspiration for his country.
Downbeat, bracingly pragmatic, beautifully written and steeped in the genre’s lore, this is a post-Troubles debut crime novel to rival Stuart Neville’s The Twelve or Brian McGilloway’s Borderlands.