The Irish Times Reviews Duffy#3

no I can't explain the Krusty The Clown hair either...

It used to be that when I had a new book out I spent the next couple of weeks doing individual blog posts covering the newspaper reviews I'd gotten for that book. This served 2 functions: it let people know about the novel who happened to miss that particular review and it gave me a little self-pat on the back...I'm not a best selling author and my books arent the sort that get on The Culture Show or Charlie Rose but I do generally get good reviews which I certainly don't mind sharing on the blog. However with this book - In The Morning I'll Be Gone - I'm not going to do that plan because it's a bit of an embarrassment of riches this time around (*blushing*) and it would make the blog extremely bloody tedious over the next fortnight if I posted every single newspaper review in full. I do appreciate all the reviews and the reviewers but I just don't to weary everyone on here with endless stuff about me, me, me. Anyway over the weekend Duffy#3 got reviews in The Daily Mail, The Sun, The Times, The Irish Times, The Irish Independent and there were interviews with me in the Sunday World and The Belfast Telegraph (the Bel Tel interview is accompanied by a really goofy looking photograph of me which a good friend of mine thinks is the worst pic of me online (I'm republishing this (right) to prove him wrong!)) and in the last couple of weeks reviews came in from, among others, The Guardian and The Sunday Times. Instead of posting them all in full I've made a supercut of those reviews (taking out plot spoilers) which you can read, here. But I do want to publish one review for the casual blog reader so the one I've picked is Declan Burke's review in The Irish Times, because it's got a short summary of the previous books, because its to the point and it because it doesn't spoil the end. 

In The Morning I'll Be Gone
Adrian McKinty

Declan Burke

A Catholic officer in the RUC during the 1980s, Sean Duffy is an insider with an outsider’s perspective, that classic staple of the crime novel. Adrian McKinty’s In the Morning I’ll Be Gone (Serpent’s Tail, €18.75) follows on from The Cold, Cold Ground (2012) and I Hear the Sirens in the Street (2013), both of which were set in Northern Ireland and had for their backdrops the 1981 hunger strikes and the scandal surrounding the DeLorean affair, respectively. Margaret Thatcher, the late British prime minister, casts a long shadow over the events of In the Morning I’ll Be Gone, which is set in 1984. 

Never fully trusted by his largely Protestant RUC colleagues, Duffy is further ostracised when an old classmate, an IRA man named Dermot McCann, escapes from the Maze prison and rumours begin to circulate about an impending IRA “spectacular”. Duffy’s pursuit of the elusive McCann provides the narrative spine for this compelling thriller, McKinty’s 10th crime title, with Duffy encountering spooks, killers and civilians sympathetic to “the cause” as he tries to navigate a bewildering hall of mirrors constructed from Northern Ireland’s myriad hidden agendas. Not content with constructing a complex plot, McKinty further wraps his story around a deliciously old-fashioned “locked room” mystery, the solution to which holds the key to Duffy’s entire investigation. Driven by McKinty’s brand of lyrical, hard-boiled prose, leavened by a fatalistic strain of the blackest humour, In the Morning I’ll Be Gone is a hugely satisfying historical thriller.