I ran some errands then spent the day finishing Adrian McKinty's Gun Street Girl. This book is set against the lead-up to the Anglo-Irish Agreement and its immediate aftermath, in late 1985. Inspector Sean Duffy knows everybody knows everything while people insist nobody knows nothing, especially when the RUC is involved. A code of silence broken only at great personal risk.
Sean's in his mid-thirties, alcoholic and a junkie, and fast approaching burnout when what he figures will be his last case for the Royal Ulster Constabulary gets him caught up in levels of intrigue that neither John Grisham nor Tom Clancy could conceive. It has a double murder, two possible suicides that you know won't be, paramilitary involvement, gun running, MI5, CIA operatives, Oxford University...the whole mosh pit of UK society, back then.
It really does have a lot of the flavor of Belfast in the mid-80's and I'm getting an idea of how soul-destroying the Troubles have been for people and the insane alliances it brought about. It also has women willing to sleep with Sean because they're hot for him. Very easy-going, for the 80's, when people were beginning to freak out about AIDs. On top of that, McKinty spends so much space on what his detective is drinking and snorting and what music he's playing and what programs he's watching, I felt almost like I was reading a textbook.
What is fun is how this book gives Chandler and Cain and Hammett major runs for their money in the cynicism department. The way the higher-ups in the judicial system are out more for brownie points with their superiors than actually solving crimes works as well in Belfast as LA. Money and power having more currency than truth is the same.
Still, I never got caught up in the story. I read it more from a sense of research than fun. Which I guess is okay. It' just I'd like to find a book that will sweep me away with its characters and events like Anna Karenina did...and Steven King's early works...but I can't think of a book that has done that, since I started writing novels. So maybe I no longer will.
That would be tragic.
Sean's in his mid-thirties, alcoholic and a junkie, and fast approaching burnout when what he figures will be his last case for the Royal Ulster Constabulary gets him caught up in levels of intrigue that neither John Grisham nor Tom Clancy could conceive. It has a double murder, two possible suicides that you know won't be, paramilitary involvement, gun running, MI5, CIA operatives, Oxford University...the whole mosh pit of UK society, back then.
It really does have a lot of the flavor of Belfast in the mid-80's and I'm getting an idea of how soul-destroying the Troubles have been for people and the insane alliances it brought about. It also has women willing to sleep with Sean because they're hot for him. Very easy-going, for the 80's, when people were beginning to freak out about AIDs. On top of that, McKinty spends so much space on what his detective is drinking and snorting and what music he's playing and what programs he's watching, I felt almost like I was reading a textbook.
What is fun is how this book gives Chandler and Cain and Hammett major runs for their money in the cynicism department. The way the higher-ups in the judicial system are out more for brownie points with their superiors than actually solving crimes works as well in Belfast as LA. Money and power having more currency than truth is the same.
Still, I never got caught up in the story. I read it more from a sense of research than fun. Which I guess is okay. It' just I'd like to find a book that will sweep me away with its characters and events like Anna Karenina did...and Steven King's early works...but I can't think of a book that has done that, since I started writing novels. So maybe I no longer will.
That would be tragic.
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