Another Irish writer, this time it's that genial chap from Father Ted and My Hero. From the cover though, you can see that this isn't going to be a genial little read.
This is a crime thriller set in small town Ireland near the border in the early noughties.
Dove Connolly is dead, apparent suicide via shotgun in the face. His best friend, Philip Starkey has returned to the town of Tullyanna to investigate how this ties in with the disappearance of his girlfriend Sandra thirteen years previously.
This kickstarts a chain of events involving strange comic books, local ex gangsters now current political candidates, more murders and lots of border politics.
It's all a bit of a curates egg. There are parts of this book that sparkle off the page. You can almost hear Ardal reading it out and it's great. It's witty and almost compulsive.
However, and this becomes more pervasive the further in you get, there are bits that are really a bit of a slog. Lots of info-dumping and not much in the way of entertaining story.
In the final chapters, we don't even witness the final reveal of the truth first hand. The heroes are told second hand by the policeman who took the confessions. It feels like a bit of a cheat to me to do it that way.
The fact that some of the revelations about the missing girl come completely from left field with no foreshadowing in the slightest is less than satisfying. There's no hint whatsoever even in any of the character's flashbacks about her (they all grew up together and were in varying relationships with the missing girl) or even in her diary that one of the lead characters has read several times. A good twist has to have some basis in what has come before, not just "oh, she'd been doing these outrageous things all along and none of you boyfriends or best friends or even her diary had any idea about it".
So all in all a mixed bag and ultimately a bit disappointing. Some great writing, and some that needs work.
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