Book review – In the morning I’ll be gone by Adrian McKinty; The third Sean Duffy novel featuring a locked room mystery and the IRA’s 1984 spectacular

Regular Crime Warp readers will know that I’m a fan of Emerald Noir in general but especially Adrian McKinty and his character Sean Duffy.  I started with a taster chapter of his first Sean Duffy book The Cold Cold Ground and was immediately hooked.  I waited anxiously for his second Sean Duffy novel I Hear the Sirens in the Street and loved the picture of corruption on a grand scale but flabbergasted when Duffy was busted down to uniform at the end of book 2.  I’ve been waiting for book 3 to find out what happened to Duffy.  Here goes….

If you thought things were bad for Duffy at the end of I Hear the Sirens in the Street things just get worse.  It’s 1984 and after a stretch in uniform Duffy is pressured into resigning from the force on a trumped up charge of injuring a pedestrian with the wing mirror of a Landrover that he wasn’t even driving!  Duffy falls into a cycle of drink and dope until one day, through the haze, Kathy and her sidekick from MI5 come calling.  Kathy is desperate for help to recapture IRA escapee Dermott McCann, as she believes McCann is planning a “spectacular” and that Duffy can help track him down.  Miracle of miracles Duffy’s back on the force!

Duffy starts to investigate, but finds few people willing to help, particularly the formidable Mary Fitzpatrick, McCann’s mother in law.  She’s more concerned about the apparently accidental death of her daughter Lizzie, who was found dead inside the family pub after closing and locking all the doors.  Soon a quiet deal is struck – if Duffy can find out who murdered Lizzie, Mary Fitzpatrick will tell him where to find McCann.  So starts a wonderful diversion, with Duffy using old fashioned detective work to solve an old fashioned locked room mystery so he can track down McCann before “the big one”.

For me, this novel is the best of the three so far.  It has a rich setting and good characters, not just cardboard cut-out Prods and Republicans.  The writing is tight keeping the action moving and the reader on the page.  The slower detective work is punctuated by episodes of fast violent action, particularly at the climax of the book when Duffy comes face to face with McCann.  I think that the cleverest thing about all of the Duffy books is that as the reader, you know what happened at the time the books were set, particularly for 1984, what “the spectacular” was and how close the IRA came to succeed in their audacious plan

As for Duffy himself, well, he’s a brilliant character, with more than a touch of “devil may care” and at times, what seems like utter recklessness, such as his meeting with Poppy Devlin in Chapter 10, both hiding the keen and astute mind of a capable detective.  Without Duffy, this could still have been an interesting book.  With Duffy at the centre it’s just fantastic.  It will come as no surprise that I recommend not only this third Sean Duffy book, but all three in the series. It also looks like I’m not the only one saying this!

Romancrimeblogger