The Midnight Choir - Softcover

Gene Kerrigan is a Dublin writer. He has been a journalist for over thirty years, Journalist of the Year in 1985 and 1990, and is the author of Another Country, This Great Little Nation (with Pat Brennan), Never Make a Promise You Can't Break: How to Succeed in Irish Politics, and the novel, Little Criminals.

The title of this crime novel might remind you of Joseph Wambaugh's I^ The Choirboys, but don't expect anything like that rambunctious, hard-hitting satire of cop life. Kerrigan's moody, unsettling tale explores the criminal underside of Dublin and, by extension, the dark, hidden face of twenty-first-century Ireland. The plot follows several stories: a woman tries to mug a pair of tourists with a syringe as her weapon; a man plans a jewelry heist; a gangster's life is torn apart by his brother's murder; a detective builds a case against an accused rapist. Kerrigan, a veteran journalist who lives in Dublin, presents his city as almost schizophrenic: on the one hand it's newly revitalized, refreshed, striding boldly into the future; on the other, just under the surface, it's seedy, falling apart, a throwback to a violent past. There is no attempt to reconcile these two very different Dublins; rather, Kerrigan makes the point that, despite cosmetic changes, the city has stayed pretty much the same. Gripping crime fiction in which the setting is unequivocally the protagonist. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved