In The Morning I'll Be Gone

In The Morning I'll Be Gone is released in North America and on audiobook format this week. I didn't want to do another blog about me, me, me but there have been so many newspaper reviews for Duffy #3 I hope you don't mind me reposting them here (I don't have any other website). Suffice to say that In The Morning I'll Be Gone is becoming the best reviewed book of my short crime fiction career. Still America is a VERY tough nut to crack so I'd appreciate it if you could leave me a review somewhere (amazon, good reads, audible etc.) or pass a copy to your mate who just happens to be the editor of The New York Times. I'm going to keep this post up for a week or so in case a curious newbie googles my name and comes here so feel totally free - regular blog readers - not to check back for 7 or 8 days. Anyway here's those reviews, I reckon it's a book most people will enjoy, although if you are upset by sturdy Chaucerian language now considered to be profane or you don't enjoy black humour or any kind of nuance in your Irish fiction then I urge you strongly NOT to buy this book...If you're on Amazon, or Audible or Good Reads, B&N, etc. please leave me a review if you get the chance. Thank you. 

A locked room mystery within a manhunt killer [is] a clever and gripping set-up that helps makes Duffy's third outing easily his best so far. 

The Sunday Times

Each book is a solid standalone, but it’s even better to ride the entire trilogy roller coaster with Duffy as your intimate companion.
The Boston Globe

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. 
  The Irish Times

This is the third in the series and, for me, the best, for it contains a locked room mystery at the heart of a drama about a major terrorist escape from the Maze prison, Belfast in 1983. Written in spare, razor-sharp prose, and leading up to a denouement that creeps up on you and then explodes like a terrorist bomb, it places McKinty firmly in the front rank of modern crime writers.

   The Daily Mail

[A] superb trilogy reaches its finality...The hunt for [Duffy's quarry] begins and ends spectacularly. McKinty is particularly convincing in painting the political and social backdrops to his plots. He deserves to be treated as one of Britain’s top crime writers.

    The Times

An action movie view of the Troubles...a fast and thrilling ride from the reliably excellent McKinty.

The Mail on Sunday

It's a sad day for fans of Adrian McKinty's smart 1980s-set procedurals featuring mordantly charismatic Belfast cop Sean Duffy. Not because his latest, In the Morning I'll Be Gone is any sort of let-down, but because it concludes what has been a hugely enjoyable trilogy. In some ways, Duffy resembles Iain Banks's young male heroes – crass and impetuous, but also wickedly funny and capable of an intense, redeeming empathy.

The Guardian

An older, more sobered Duffy, still unconventional and willing to take chances, but more reflective, more Sherlock Holmes. His growing maturity result in fewer bedroom scenes but there is plenty of excitement and suspense elsewhere in this intelligent and gripping yarn.

      The Irish Independent

Sardonic Belfast cop Sean Duffy [in] another terrific Troubles-set thriller 4.5/5

      The Sun

You also might want to check out this extraordinary review of Duffy#1 at The Drowning Machine Blog by an American reviewer who really understood what I was trying to do with the book. 

The Cold Cold Ground - The Irish Independent's Verdict

Castlemara Estate, Carrickfergus, 2011

Maurice Hayes reviews The Cold Cold Ground in Sunday's Irish Indy. I love the review but be careful, there are some spoilers near the end...And as usual I'd appreciate your reviews on Amazon, Good Reads or your blog. Over to you space cowboy: 

Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy introduced by Adrian McKinty in the first of a trilogy of detective stories set in Northern Ireland in the middle of the Troubles, could well become a cult figure.

A Catholic member of the RUC (one of the 7pc) equally at risk of being murdered by the IRA for his profession and by loyalists for his religion, an Irish speaker from the Glens of Antrim, fluent in several languages, with a degree in psychology and an interest in opera, tempted to join the IRA after Bloody Sunday and propelled into the police by a pub bombing, courting a pathologist girlfriend among the corpses, he is a very unusual copper indeed.

McKinty has established a good track record in the genre and in his return to his native sod for he shows that he has not lost his touch or his eye for the bizarre and the macabre, or his ear for the Belfast accent and argot.

The plot has Duffy assigned to investigate what appears to be a serial killer of homosexuals who taunts the police by placing clues strewn with obscure references to operas, and the apparently unconnected suicide of the estranged wife of a hunger striker.

Set against a backdrop of riots in the middle of the 1981 hunger strikes and the death of Bobby Sands, McKinty creates a marvellous sense of time and place; an evocation of darkness and horror, of corruption and collusion, of the fraught life of a policeman, of the domination of areas by paramilitary groups at war with each other and with the British state but colluding on drugs and criminality, the immediacy of death and the cheapness of life.

Taken off the case when he stumbles on an IRA connection, warned off by Special Branch and army intelligence protective of their agents and informants, Duffy keeps doggedly on, defying the rules and risks to himself and his girlfriend until he secures a confession and a very rough sort of justice for the murders which turn out not to be homophobic, but an attempt by a mole to cover his tracks.

Real people walk in and out of the story.

There are a couple of nearly recognisable loyalist warlords, and a character based loosely on Freddie Scappaticci is central to the story, and the old chestnut of whether Gerry Adams might be Stakeknife.

In the speed of the action and the twists of the plot, small details do not always matter, but a few will grate with local readers.

In the main, though, he manages to catch the brooding atmosphere of the 1980s and to tell a ripping yarn at the same time.

There will be many readers waiting for the next adventure of the dashing and intrepid Sergeant Duffy.