Publication Day!

My new novel I Hear The Sirens In The Street is published in the UK and Ireland today. It's the continuation of the story of Detective Inspector Sean Duffy which began last year with the novel The Cold Cold Ground and will conclude next year with In The Morning I'll Be Gone. This time Duffy gets himself mixed up with the DeLorean car plant, the FBI, British Intelligence, lonely widows, Morrissey* and other savory and unsavory types. You can read the first 8 chapters of Sirens if you click on the link to the right of this page. We were lucky enough to get two blurbs for Sirens which appear on the jacket. Ian Rankin said "It blew my doors off" which when you read the book you'll hopefully find as funny as I did. We also got a really nice quote from Daniel Woodrell, who - as regular blog readers will know - is one of my writing role models. This is what Mr Woodrell had to say:

Adrian McKinty has the chops to do all manner of things with words, and in I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET he unleashes a strain of rough and visual, sly and lyric narrative prose in service of one hell of a story. Sean Duffy is a great creation, a figure of many parts, and the place comes alive---a uniquely beautiful and nasty part of the world I'd be scared to visit if everybody didn't sound like they might be cousins of my dad on my mom's side. 
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You can get Sirens at the usual places: bookshops, dodgy market stalls, ebay, from my next door neighbour who has gone through my bins, maybe the occasional supermarket. If you want to purchase the book online, yes it's available on Amazon.co.uk as a paperback version and when the US version is released in May it will be available on Amazon.com. The audiobook won't be out for a few weeks as my esteemed colleague the great narrator Gerard Doyle is directing a play until the end of March and has more than enough on his plate.
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If you do get the book I'd appreciate a review if you can spare the time (I've been subject to an unfortunate bit of sock puppeting and trolling in the last few months so it would be nice to redress the balance).
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Anyway here's the amazon.co.uk link and if you're really desperate to get the book early in Australia or America of course Amazon.co.uk will ship it to you wherever you are in the world. Ciao and happy reading...
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*Perhaps I should point that I'm only kidding about Morrissey (as he's a pretty litigious fellow) but there is one very oblique Morrissey reference/shout out where one of the characters in Sirens is reading Legion of the Cramps, the Cramps fanzine which, at that stage was edited by his Manky Miserableness himself.

Winter's Bone

Winter's Bone is the best film about Northern Ireland that I've seen. Of course it isn't actually set in Northern Ireland, it's actually set in an Ulster Scots community in the Ozark Mountains. But the people who left Ulster for Appalachia two and a half centuries ago are virtually indistinguishable from the ones who stayed behind. As David Hackett Fischer shows in his book Albion's Seed, the Ulster Scots were the clannish border fighters who settled in Ulster around the time of the Plantations in Ireland (c. 1600), many of whom subsequently emigrated to the US in the mid eighteenth century. Jim Webb does a nice job describing the Ulster Scots in his book Born Fighting, explaining that these people were natural hunters and trackers who despised authority and who thus formed the backbone of the US Army in several wars.

This is the synopsis of the film from the movie's website. I don't think it gives too much away.

Seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) sets out to track down her father, who put their house up for his bail bond and then disappeared. If she fails, Ree and her family will be turned out into the Ozark woods. Challenging her outlaw kin's code of silence and risking her life, Ree hacks through the lies, evasions and threats offered up by her relatives and begins to piece together the truth.

Part thriller, part atmospheric observation piece, Winter's Bone is a great piece of work. The mountains are beautifully shot, the performances are subtle and the mood is tense and claustrophobic. Everyone is related to everyone else in this small country community and there is no firm line between good and evil. Just like in rural Ulster the one thing you are taught when dealing with the law is that "whatever you say, say nothing." Ree's journey has a gothic, fairy tale aspect but it's very much grounded in grim twenty first century reality. The film is also much more disturbing & frightening than all those tedious slasher movies everywhere in the multiplexes.

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If you want to understand Northern Ireland, ignore the Hollywood pap and watch Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday and Winter's Bone instead.