The great John Dugdale of The Sunday Times reviews Duffy#3, In The Morning I'll Be Gone, in today's paper thusly: Adrian McKinty’s In the Morning I’ll Be Gone (Serpent’s Tail £12.99, ST Bookshop price £10.99), sees his smart, irreverent Northern Irish detective Sean Duffy carrying out a secret mission in 1984. Duffy’s former schoolmate Dermot McCann has escaped from prison, and MI5 wants the IRA bomber traced. Duffy’s inquiries get nowhere until he meets McCann’s mother-in-law, Mary, whose younger daughter supposedly died in an accident in a pub. Mary believes she was murdered, and promises to reveal the terrorist’s whereabouts if he identifies the killer.
The novel hence becomes a locked room mystery within a manhunt killer, a clever and gripping set-up that helps makes Duffy's third outing easily his best so far. Like its predecessors it weaves a fictional narrative into real events. In this case with its climax at the [deleted because of spoilers] McKinty's reworking of history has wider resonance...
I'm afraid that's as far as I got in the story before the paywall kicked in, but it sounded like he liked it. Of course there could be a huge kick in the pants in the next paragraph. If you're a Times subscriber you can read the whole thing, here. (Do be careful of that spoiler alert though).
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And while its not my place to tell you how to spend your Amazon voucher, Christmas bonus or Book token (do such things still exist?) I will say that Duffy#1 won the Spinetingler Award for best crime novel, Duffy#2 was shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel and now we have the knowledgeable Mr Dugdale saying this is in fact the best of the three. . .
