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 Times Weighs In On The Cold Cold Ground

The London Times (still I think the paper of record in the UK) weighed in on The Cold Cold Ground on Saturday. The piece was written by the well read and perspicacious Peter Millar. The first line of the review is funny but its the last line that is the killer: 
..
Times, The (London, England) - Saturday, January 14, 2012

Author: Peter Millar
...
The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty 
Serpent's Tail, 352pp £12.99 £11.69 
...
When I was growing up in Northern Ireland there were two very rare species: Catholic policemen, and people who left as students but came back. In Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy, Ulster-born Adrian McKinty has given us a hero who is traumatised enough by "the troubles" to want to do something to stop the madness of mutual murder by two tribes who have more in common with each other than anyone else. 
...
But when he is called to deal with what looks like a routine murder of an IRA or UVF informer on a housing estate in Carrickfergus, he finds something else: a corpse that has been ritually sodomised and had the score from a Puccini opera inserted in his rectum. Is he on the trail of Northern Ireland's first serial killer with a sexual rather than a paramilitary motive? In a world wherein which "ordinary criminals" are scarce, the Catholic Church considers divorce and abortion crimes and MI5 muddies the waters, Duffy finds himself in a wilderness of mirrors, scared of his own reflection. 
...
McKinty himself left Northern Ireland and didn't come back, but perhaps that distance — he now lives in Australia — has helped him to preserve a razor sharp ear for the local dialogue and a feeling for the bleak time and place that was Ulster in the early Eighties, and pair them with a wry wicked wit. 
...
If Raymond Chandler had grown up in Northern Ireland, The Cold Cold Ground is what he would have written.