As you know I can't get a review of my Sean Duffy novels in the US press for love nor money (admittedly I haven't actually tried love or money...yet) but at least all the British, Irish and Australian newspapers are reviewing me. This latest review was from last Sunday's Australian newspaper and was written by the multi-talented Graeme Blundell who you non Aussies might still recognise as Natalie Portman's father in Star Wars......
I Hear The Sirens In The Street
Adrian McKinty
Reviewed by Graeme Blundell The Australian July 14 2013
The first book in McKinty's Sean Duffy series, The Cold Cold Ground, found Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy newly promoted and posted to Carrickfergus CID in Northern Ireland in 1981 at the height of the Troubles. Now living in Melbourne, Northern Irish born McKinty took us inside the sectarian violence of the period as Duffy, a Catholic cop trusted by no one in a Protestant town, struggled with two different cases: one was Northern Ireland's first possible serial killer who was possibly preying on homosexuals and the second was the mysterious suicide of a young woman that looked a lot murder. Now in the new novel Duffy has got a man's headless body in a suitcase dumped in an abandoned factory. Army helicopters are still flying low over the lough, sirens are wailing in County Down and the distant thump thump in the background is the sound of mortars or explosions. McKinty is seriously brilliant, his flair for language matched by his remarkable feel for place, appetite for redemptive violence and gravely cool appreciation of characters who reject conformity. There are echoes of Dennis Lehane, Joseph Wambaugh, Eoin McNamee and even Raymond Chandler but McKinty is resolutely his own hard man.
