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It's 1981 and Belfast is in turmoil. It's the beginning of the end, but it doesn't feel like it. The melancholy procession of dead hunger strikers from the gates of Long Kesh has begun, and tension on the street is at breaking point. When a body turns up on waste ground, one hand severed and placed on its chest, overstretched detectives are inclined to regard it as an informer killing and consign it to the file marked unsolvable. That's until Detective Sean Duffy starts to notice errant details about the corpse, such as the fact that the severed hand deposited with the body belongs to someone else. The discovery of another body seems to confirm the existence of a homophobic serial killer. The missing wife of a hunger striker appears unrelated. But in this northern endgame the murky undercurrents flow in unexpected directions.
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The Cold Cold Ground is Adrian McKinty's 12th novel. He is one of a new generation of writers from the north who use the tools of the crimewriter's trade to examine and reshape the recent past. The detectives are wisecracking and self-aware. The material seems to lend itself to side-of-the-mouth invective, the sly one-liner. What's real and what isn't collide in the corpse-murk of hidden wars, and narratives are shaped to take account of it. Here Gerry Adams makes an appearance, a seedy loyalist takes on the persona of dead loyalist George Seawright, and its not much of a leap from McKinty's Freddie Scavanni to Freddie Scappattici, the infamous informer Stakeknife.
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It's an uneasy technique, but there is an integrity to it. Death-squad acronyms are switched from one side to the other. McKinty is pointing to the fact that perceived reality and fiction in conflict zones are equally untrustworthy. One is as manufactured as the other, and the only thing we can do is to be aware of it. Sean Duffy is an anomaly, a Catholic cop in an overwhelmingly unionist police force, but McKinty is less concerned with that than with the camaraderies of the force. And he's good on the details: life through the observation slit of an armoured vehicle. Like all good fictional cops, Duffy has a nose for the erotics of last things, and finds himself hooked up with a beautiful pathologist.
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The Cold Cold Ground confirms McKinty as a writer of substance. There's a gear shift from a crimewriter's craftsmanship when he casts his eye on the towns caught in Belfast's malign gravitational pull, such as Carrickfergus and Larne. McKinty is at home in these lost towns, with their Victoria Streets and Sandringham Terraces, their transgressive inner life at odds with street names that reveal a longing for home-counties certitudes. What makes McKinty a cut above the rest is the quality of his prose. His driven, spat-out sentences are more accessible than James Ellroy's edge-of-reason staccato, and he can be lyric. The sound of a riot is "the distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship".
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The names of David Peace and Ellroy are evoked too often in relation to young crime writers, but McKinty shares their method of using the past as a template for the present. The stories and textures may belong to a different period, but the power of technique and intent makes of them the here and now.
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There's food for thought in McKinty's writing, but he is careful not to lose the force of his narrative in introspection. The Cold Cold Ground is a crime novel, fast-paced, intricate and genre to the core. The violence is extreme and the sex is gritty. Duffy's three murder cases are isolated on the surface, but in the dark world of dirty wars, the dead are seldom unconnected, and rarely innocent as they beckon to us from the cold, cold earth.
• Eoin McNamee's Orchid Blue is published by Faber.
