PRESTIGE DRAMA, debut novel from a stellar storyteller

PRESTIGE DRAMA
SÉMAS O'REILLY
Grand Central Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Derry is already abuzz with news that famous American actor, Monica Logue, has flown to the city and will be starring in a new series set during the Troubles. And then she goes missing...

All eyes are on Diarmuid, the flaky scriptwriter who was the last to see Monica alive. From budding young actors hoping for a role to grieving parent whose story forms the backbone of the narrative; newspaper editors covering the mystery to taxi drivers hearing all the news from their clients, The Dogs in the Street follows the city's cast as they all try to locate themselves in Monica's disappearance.

Séamas O'Reilly's debut novel is a comedy about dramatising tragedy, and the responsibilities of a teller to a tale. It brings to life the voices of a city, the people, families and communities who find themselves obsessed with, and terrified of, interrogating their past.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Author of the poignant, hilarious memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? delivers a novel of The Troubles™...this seems to be a rite of passage for Irish writers born after 1950...via a lens I found mostly successful. A TV production hub in factual reality, Northern Ireland was a violent and terrifying place not that long ago. A multi-part limited series being made there is a welcome boost to the economy, and to the good image the country badly needs to project into the world.

But a film being made about The Troubles™ is a different proposition altogether. That topic is quite sensitive. So when Monica Logue starts researching her starring role in this prestige drama, the mere act of talking to people about the past..."How do you talk about the past as a person still living it, in a place that barely survived it?" the author has a character muse...sets off explosions of the same emotions that threatened to destroy the societal fabric of the place. Is it any wonder she just vanishes? The real question is "how." Did she run away from threats and intimidation, was she kidnapped by people she frightened with her research, was this another ugly political assassination to silence a voice digging in dirt some powerful people buried bodies in?

A very short read of under 200pp ought not to offer satisfying conclusions to these questions, that's just too little space. "Hold my beer" says Author Séamas, and delivers a series of tight storytelling-heavy chapters from multiple points of view. The only one you see more than once is, unsurprisingly, Diarmuid the writer of the television series. Each of them flows into the next, not always seamlessly, but that did not jar me out of the narrative flow. All the chapters are, as mentioned, storytelling-heavy...focused on making your idea of what's happening in that moment illuminate the journey to the resolution of the plot.

As a debut novel, this is the cream of the crop. Author Séamas is an experienced storyteller, his writing-craft chops are well-exercised from prior work done. In the places I was less that ecstatic, it was down to my feelings about the choice he made to have the novel mirror a screenplay in its tightness, its use of the delightful discursiveness of his characters mainly in dialogue. I'd've enjoyed more "Irishness" throughout. I found his memoir so very delighful because it had observations expressed in the same voice as the dialogue. That, of course, works better in personal and factual contexts. It adds distance in that setting, allowing truly horrendously painful memories to be seen as past, not immediate and awful...which is why I found their relative absence odd here.

I'm in no way trying to put you off the read, please understand that. It was a delight, well mostly a delight to learn why Monica was treated as she was. I want the pleasures of this read to be the main take-away you have for this story. I have a minor few cavils, none of which made me think I should move on to the next DRC on the Kindle.

A debut novel from a stellar storyteller that's a treasure of time to read.

THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, a Goodreads group-read that really rang me like a bell

THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST
STUART NEVILLE
Soho Crime
$14.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Sooner or later, everybody pays.

Gerry Fegan, a former paramilitary contract killer, is haunted by the ghosts of the 12 people he has slaughtered. Every night, on the point of losing his mind, he drowns their screams in drink. His solution is to kill those who engineered their deaths.

From the greedy politicians to the corrupt security forces, the street thugs to the complacent bystanders who let it happen, all are called to account. But when Fegan's vendetta threatens to derail a hard-won truce and destabilise the government, old comrades and enemies alike want him dead.

Winner of the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Thriller.

My Review: First, read this:

“Hate's a terrible thing. It's a wasteful, stupid emotion. You can hate someone with all your heart, but it'll never do them a bit of harm. The only person it hurts is you. You can spend your days hating, letting it eat away at you, and the person you hate will go on living just the same. So what's the point?”

That's the logical, and irrefutable, argument against hate. But there's no chance humans will give up hating. It's an addictive drug, a high that can only be bested by the Absolute Assurance that YOU ARE RIGHT, They are Wrong, and therefore they deserve _____. Ireland's been in the toils of both, Hate and Rightness, for centuries. They've made it the basis for their identity as a nation. It ain't goin' nowhere.

That grim prognostication delivered, the story we're told in this (debut!) novel is based around a single person's efforts to mitigate the toll Hate takes on society as a whole. That he's chosen, um, a counter-productive solution to the problem is...kind of the core of the read. The way there's no out for a person whose persona is warped by war, by violent and utterly anti-social normative training, whose core is eaten out to nothingness by hatred. That is who such a one will be always. And Gerry Fegan is a stone-cold killer, a person whose life is without the sense of remorse that a normal person would have for depriving others of their entire futures.

Which is why they haunt him. Their ghosts won't let him sleep, or think, or be normal.

Discussions of Gerry's ghosts' reality are circular. Real? Imaginary? Guilt phantasms? Doesn't matter. Gerry is the person he's been made into. The ghosts demand something be done to balance the scales of their lost futures. And Gerry being their instrument means that something will be murderous.

This is a huge problem for the world. Men and women like Gerry exist all over the globe, and they represent a ticking time-bomb of violence and chaos in every place they exist. Conflicts based on such idiotic things as religion and ethnicity and national identity are going to sink any "peace process" that ever gets past the hot-air stage. People like these need their Hate-hit to feel good. Feeling good, about yourself, about your superior place in the world, is fundamental to humans' ability to thrive. In far too many cases, that represents itself as Hate for Others. Nothing effective has ever been done about that...can anything effective ever be done about it? Don't look at Ireland. It's a pink-skinned Rwanda.

And this novel, this brilliant noir tale of revenge if not exactly redemption, brings that to its...conclusion is the wrong word. "Stopping place" in the sense of "the buck stops here" is permaybehaps closer. The man Gerry, expiating his sins, commits others...but do they count as sins? They're balancing scales, not to say that the choice of method is one I approve of. But he's made some attempt to redress the vile acts he's committed. By committing others.

The Mahatma was correct. The world continues to ignore him, and the cycle of violence continues to spiral ever downward into chaos.

Finally, let me say that this book's the first in a series called "Jack Lennon Investigations." This will bumfuzzle most readers. "Who the hell's Jack Lennon?" I hear you ask. Well...don't worry your pretty little head about it is my response. Read Collusion and don't fuss. It's well worth your eyeblinks, just as this delight of a violent, nihilistic noir read is.

THE INISHOWEN MYSTERIES, first of the five to date starring Ben O'Keeffe: DEATH AT WHITEWATER CHURCH

DEATH AT WHITEWATER CHURCH
ANDREA CARTER (Inishowen Mysteries #1)
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$1.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A missing groom—a deconsecrated church—a hidden crypt—a skeleton wrapped in a blanket

When a skeleton is discovered in the hidden crypt of a deconsecrated church, everyone is convinced the bones must be those of Conor Devitt, a local man who went missing on his wedding day six years previously. But the postmortem reveals otherwise.

Solicitor Benedicta “Ben” O’Keeffe is acting for the owners of the church, and although an unwelcome face from her past makes her reluctant to get involved, when Conor’s brother dies in strange circumstances shortly after coming to see her, she finds herself drawn in to the mystery. Whose is the skeleton in the crypt and how did it get there? Is Conor Devitt still alive, and if so, is there a link? What happened on the morning of his wedding to make him disappear?

Negotiating between the official investigation—headed up by the handsome but surly Sergeant Tom Molloy—and obstructive locals with secrets of their own, Ben unravels layers of personal and political history to get to the truth of what happened six years before.

TELEVISION ADAPTATION ON THE WAY!

Death at Whitewater Church is the first in a series of Ben O’Keeffe mysteries set on the Inishowen Peninsula in County Donegal, Ireland.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A terrific series-starting book, also an excellent publishing debut. Author Carter is a talented writer and was well-served in her editor. The flourishes rhetorical were agreeable:

Being an outsider in a town where most people have spent their whole lives is not the easiest way to live. Sometimes, in my darker moments, I felt as if my role here was limited to that of an observer and facilitator for other people. That my own life was a sort of half-life, as if I didn’t really count because no one knew my “people.” But I have my reasons for being here.

Pretty, also useful, also informative. A good writer takes that kind of direction from a good editor..."make the infodump into a confession!" resounds to a truly wickedly attuned writer like Author Carter is.

There are many twists and turns in Ben's trip through Whitewater's past. Her beautiful world of small-town solicitor worries, conveyances and wills and the like, is completely upended by the toothy rocks she's clung to while getting herself out of the North Atlantic after one of her truly daft February swims. Her local knowledge makes the stakes of learning her new community's older secrets all the more poignant and relevant.

I'll offer a mild criticism here: There is very little sense of the Love Interest's appeal. He's a blank canvas with some sketch-lines showing what he can possibly be. Even the moments that are the most intimate between Ben and Tom, before the fire and after the wine, aren't so much said as reported in the past tense.

It's a minor whinge. It niggled slightly and I noticed it, so I bring it up. But the *important* bit is the crimes that were and are committed in this small town. It's quite the surprise as to who's been bad and why. I found the resolution quite unimpeachably witnessed and for reasons I was completely sure were logical. The resolution fit the facts, and the way it's told to us is well within my suspension of disbelief.

Bravo, Author Carter, for making this series-starting novel a career-starting one as well.

TransAtlantic, Colum McCann's polyphonic piece of Irish Abolitionism meets Aeronautical Achievement meets the End of the Troubles

TRANSATLANTIC
COLUM MCCANN
Random House
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.85* of five

The Publisher Says: National Book Award-winning novelist Colum McCann delivers his most ambitious and beautiful novel yet, tying together a series of narratives that span 150 years and two continents in an outstanding act of literary bravura.

In 1845 a black American slave lands in Ireland to champion ideas of democracy and freedom, only to find a famine unfurling at his feet. In 1919, two brave young airmen emerge from the carnage of World War One to pilot the very first transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to the west of Ireland. And in 1998 an American senator criss-crosses the ocean in search of a lasting Irish peace. Bearing witness to these history-making moments of Frederick Douglass, John Alcock and "Teddy" Brown, and George Mitchell, and braiding the story together into one epic tale, are four generations of women from a matriarchal clan, beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan. In this story of dark and light, men and women, history and past, fiction and fact, National Book Award-winning novelist Colum McCann delivers a tour de force that is his most spectacular achievement to date.

My Review: This is an ambitious book indeed. McCann refines storytelling techniques he used in Let the Great World Spin, and layers in more complexity than he created in that National Book Award-winner. For that reason alone, I'd give him high marks.

But as a work of social commentary on Ireland, on its colonial past and its enraged present, the book comes alive. Without ever leaving his focus on the personal lives of people, he limns the results of the struggle of his homeland to be its ownself. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, is in Ireland to raise money for Abolition in the USA. Isn't that a nice cause for turn-about, with the IRA raising money in the USA for its militancy?

Webb took him out onto the verandah by the elbow and said: But Frederick, you cannot bite the hand that feeds.

The stars collandered the Wexford night. He knew Webb was right. There would always be an alignment. There were so many sides to every horizon. He could only choose one. No single mind could hold it all at once. Truth, justice, reality, contradiction. Misunderstandings could arise. He had one cause only. He must cleave to it.

He paced the verandah. A cold wind whipped off the water.

The water, the recurring use of the water, the wind off the water, being in the water, all of it the Atlantic, all of it marking transformation and immersion in the moment of transformation for each character...that's lovely.

The toughness and surivorhood of Ireland's women is a major part of the story. So is the deep-seated need of the Irish to Be Irish.

She stood at the window. It was her one hundred twenty-eighth day of watching men die. They came down the road in wagons pulled by horses. She had never seen such a bath of killing before. The wheels screeched. The line of wagons stretched down the path, into the trees. The trees themselves stretched off into the war.

She came down the stairs, through the open doors, into the wide heat...The men had exhausted their shouts. They were left with small whimperings, tiny gasps of pain...One soldier wore sergeant's stripes on his sleeve, and a gold harp stitched on his lapel. An Irishman. She had tended to so many of them.

So is the quixotic character of men, pushing boundaries that separate them (in their minds) from Glory. (The transAtlantic flight of the title...so very male in its pointless bravado, and in its gauntlet-flinging results of commonplace transAtlantic air travel.)

It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become a myth. The Great War had concussed the world. The unbearable news of sixteen million deaths rolled off the great metal drums of the newspapers. Europe was a crucible of bones.

That's plain old-fashioned beautiful phrase-making.

But in the end, the story large and small is about the strength of women to carry on. The struggles of men against the futility of their existence, a mere accident of evolution's need to stir the pot to keep the soup of life boiling merrily instead of burning irretrievably, are as ever and as always propped up, supported, allowed to exist, by women, evolution's one essential ingredient, carriers of whatever life the planet holds and makers of whatever future the men leave alone in their ceaseless tinkering.

The tap of his cane on the floor. The clank of the water pipes. She is wary of making too much of a fuss. Doesn't want to embarrass him, but he's certainly slowing up these weathers. What she dreads is a thump on the floor, or a falling against the banisters, or worse still a tumble down the stairs. She climbs the stairs before {he} emerges from the bathroom. A quick wrench of worry when there is no sound, but he emerges with a slightly bewildered look on his face. He has left a little shaving foam on the side of his chin, and his shirt is haphazardly buttoned.

...The ancient days of the Grand Opera House, the Hippodrome, the Curzon, the Albert Memorial Clock. The two of them out tripping the light fantastic. So young then. The smell of his tweeds. The Turkish tobacco he used to favor. The charity balls in Belfast, her gown rustling on the steps, {her husband} beside her, bow-tied, brilliantined, tipsy.

Worry for the present...nostalgia for the past...awareness of the short horizon of the future. She will bear it all. He will be borne to his bourn-side bier on the shoulders of this woman.

And the wonder of it is...it goes on.