Eoin McNameeCritiques

Danny Caulfield's quiet Christmas break from Wilsons, the school for spies, is shattered by gunshots and a heartrending discovery about his parents. That same night, he's summoned to Wilsons' to prepare for a mission: under an assumed identity, Danny must find a way to protect the Treaty Stone that keeps peace between the Upper and Lower worlds. Meanwhile, the evil Ring of Five pursues Danny, for he is the "true Fifth"—only Danny can unite the members of the Ring and awaken their full powers as master spies

This novel is about a young boy who finds himself in a very strange situation.

Owen's father committed suicide, and people around town whisper that Owen will follow in his father's footsteps. Mom has sunk into a fog of depression. In Owen's forest hideaway, there is a huge flash, and everything has changed. Geographically, Owen is in the same place, but everything, and everyone, that he knew is gone. A person called the Sub-Commandant tells Owen that a rag-tag group of humans called the Resisters are at war with ethereal beings called the Harsh. They have succeeded in causing time to run backwards. The intention of the Harsh is to go back to a time before humans, take over Earth, and turn it into a frozen wasteland.

Some of the Resisters think that Owen is a spy for the Harsh, or, at minimum, a collaborator. Before he died, Owen's father played a significant part in causing the war. The only way to end the war, and to get time going in the right direction, is to bring a special piece called the Mortmain, to the Puissance, or Great Machine, far to the north. Then Owen must go down into the earth a great distance, and place the Mortmain in the right spot. Naturally, the Harsh will be waiting. Does Owen succeed? Does Own even survive? Is everything restored to the way it was?

As you may have guessed, this is a young adult novel, and, as such, it is pretty good. There are good characters, and plenty of action. Older young people, and adults, will also like this book.

This book is disappointing the novel is about the mysterious disappearance of Robert Noriac he was an undercover M15 agent in Northern Ireland he went missing presumed dead in 1977
Blair Agnew an ex policeman wants to write a book about this event.

Book is complicated and keeps jumping a shame because it could have been a really good read.½

A Masterpiece from the Irish Master.

Blue is the Night is the final part of Eoin McNamee’s loose crime trilogy based on events in Belfast between 1949 and 1952, based on real events turned in to novel format which gets its claws in to you. What I like about Blue is the Night it is a wonderful examination of murder, guilt, madness and corruption as well as the ghosts of the past. Knowing that all this was possible in a democratic country and when you look at the cases themselves you wonder you really do wonder what the truth was and is.

In April 1949 a young man known as Robert the Painter is arrested for the murder of
Mary McGowan and is sent for trial by the Attorney General Lance Curran who will prosecute the case, nothing new in that. The only problem this case is in Belfast in 1949 the six counties of Ulster are no longer part of the new Republic of Ireland and have been separated for little over twenty years. There is a great divide between the Catholic and the mainly Protestant community’s suspicion and fear, Catholics fearing that they are not given a fair hearing in Parliament or in the eyes of the law. This murder has been committed by a protestant on a catholic woman, all the ingredients for some very major problems in Belfast.

Lance Curran prosecutes the case in defiance of the majority Protestants who do everything they can to have the case dismissed or at least the defence win. While doing this Curran has much to contend with at home, his wife and her mental illnesses, his wayward daughter and his religious son. While Ferguson his fix is always moving in the background doing fixing but for who? Then in 1952 Patricia Curran’s daughter is murdered and the book is about the search for the truth for the 1949 and 1952 murders. All this takes place in the 1960s as now Judge Curran sits on the trial of a murder similar to the murder of his daughter.

Ferguson attempts to find the truth amongst everything else that has gone on and he is dependant up on Doris Curran revealing what happened the night of Patricia’s murder the only problem she is a resident of a mental health hospital and not too lucid very often. To find the truth he has to unpick what he did in those distant years to be able to get close to the truth.

What I like about Blue Is the Night is the clear prose and how it makes the sentences pass by with ease as NcNamee draws you further in with this compulsive story. This is an examination of trying to deal with your own conscience while everything else is out of your own control. How the evil in the world can sometimes be protected from the world by corruption and lies even if they intent is for the greater good. It is a wonderful examination of how complex we all are and ask ourselves what would we have done? This is a brilliant retelling of events of Belfast in its infancy when everything was at stake and still is.

Belfast in the early seventies. What a scary place. Violence is everywhere, bombings, secteristic murders and punishment of traitors (like the guy with a catholic fishing buddy) happens daily. And the city McNamee paints in a vivid grey is a place where the violence is even so normal it has pushed everything else out of people’s minds. It’s routine. In the pubs the discussions are all about ballistics and calibers. About who’s in jail and for how long. Or if there’s any truth to the statement that there’s still a higher risk of dying in traffic than from terrorism. Local knowledge is everything. A person who doesn’t know to which side each single street belongs is in grave danger. Palestine Street. Chlorine Park. Tomb Street.

And in this city walks Victor and his small gang of butchers. Where everybody else uses bombs or clinical gunshots, they torture their victims with hundreds of slow stab wounds. Victor is a cold-blooded psychopath, a serial killer among terrorists. He’s not only scaring the Catholics he hates, but the people on his own side too – the loyalist terrorists. Slowly, he is becoming a liability to the cause.

McNamee paints a bleak and scary portrait of a man and a time and place. We get to sense what might be Victor’s true subconscious motives between the lines, but mostly this is told as a straight and simple story. Perhaps just a little too straight. This is not a sophisticated book, but the ambience of it is masterfully created. It’s almost hard to believe it tells of a European reality from not that long ago.½

Danny Caulfield bears a striking resemblance to a Cherb, which at Wilsons, a school that trains cadets to be spys, is something to be hated and killed. After he convinces everyone that he isn't a Cherb, and figures out how he ended up at Wilsons instead of the school he thought he was going to, the adventure really begins. It's a bit hard to follow, because there are all sorts of twists and turns and you're not sure who is really on Danny's side or not, but that's intentional. Danny is supposedly, the fifth, which is the person who can complete the ring of five and make the evil group of spies able to take over two worlds. Although the story had elements that made it interesting, there were too many parts where the story dragged a bit to make me love it. The book is definitely set up to have a sequel IF it is well received. It seems like it was trying to be a Harry Potter knock off, since Danny has two friends, a boy and a girl, from the school he attends.½

What if Princess Diana's fatal automobile accident were actually a successful assassination? That's the premise of this spy/thriller novel. I've not read much of this genre, but the sad, lonely and flawed agents keep us guessing as to who the bad guys are, and who the good guys are. Even though we, of course, know the outcome from the very beginning, this is still a very suspenseful read.½

Danny Caulfield is a loner. No one seems to stay around too long with him, not even his parents. The kids at school all tease him for his physical abnormalities: Two different colored eyes, one Blue and the other brown, and a triangular shaped face. But things may be changing for Danny when his parents decide to send him to a boarding school called Heston Oaks. The story begins with Danny in his room awaiting a cab to take him to Heston Oaks. His parents are not around to watch him off. From the moment the cab arrives, Danny can tell that things are not right.

His cab driver is a menacing looking man who speeds off the moment Danny gets in the backseat.During the rushed ride in the middle of of the rain, Danny begins to wonder what is happening as he realizes that his surroundings do not look familiar. But the cab then stops in front of a magnificent looking building with many towers, windows, and floors. When Danny walks inside,little does he know that he is about to begin a crazy adventure.

He was not brought to Heston Oaks but to Wilsons, a school that trains its students in the arts of Spying. It is at Wilsons where Danny's life is changed Forever. He befriends Les, a boy that has wings, Dixie who can disappear in quick flashes, and Vandra a physick. There are many other students at Wilson that each possess different abilities as well. They attend classes to improve strategies, disguises, and logic.

Danny seems to fit in well at Wilsons, for he seems to naturally possess all of the qualities of a perfect Spy, even the most dangerous one of all, the ability to betray. But there is more to Wilsons then meets the eye. Someone is trying to murder Danny and a mission is planned out in which he will face many horrible truths and lies.

I loved Danny's character. His imperfections and bravery truly touched my heart. Wilsons is a very intriguing place for a school. In fact, it somewhat reminded me of Hogwarts from the Harry Potter series. There are many rooms and secrets within the school. Eoin McNamee's writing is SUPERB! There are so many twists and turns within this book that you have no choice but to keep reading in order to find out what happens next as well as finding out what is truth from lie.

There are SO MANY characters and inventive words within this story. Its a whole world on its own! For those who love Harry Potter or The Series of Unfortunate Events book, you will LOVE this story! I can't wait for the next book in the series!!!

Reviewed by Candace Cunard for TeensReadToo.com

Owen is ostracized by the other children around him for his father's death long ago, a presumed suicide that resulted in his mother being thrown into a haze of depression from which she cannot escape. By his young teens, he's quietly self-reliant, managing the house on his own and taking care of his mother who is forgetful and not always lucid. He spends his time wandering around the terrain outside of his house, by a river and an abandoned old building that was once a workhouse.

One day, Owen meets a strange man near the river right before witnessing a strange flash of darkness. The man, who introduces himself as the Sub-Commandant, explains to Owen that the mysterious flash signifies that a group of creatures known as the Harsh have succeeded in turning back time to before human habitation, so that they can live alone in solitude and turn the Earth to a barren, ice-encrusted waste. Owen does not believe the Sub-Commandant at first, but when he runs away to find his home, he is faced with nothing but ruins.

The Sub-Commandant brings Owen back to the Workhouse, which Owen learns is situated on an "island in time" that the Harsh cannot touch, and home to the Resisters, a rag-tag fighting force whose purpose it is to defeat the Harsh and prevent them from tampering with Earth's timeflow. Owen quickly becomes swept up in the affairs of the Resisters, who do not understand why he did not disappear along with all of the other people and signs of human life in the world. Some even suspect that he is a Harsh spy, and mistrust him. Along the way he meets with several compelling characters, including Cati, the Sub-Commandant's daughter, and Dr. Diamond, an expert in the science of time. While with the Resisters, Owen learns things about time that he can barely believe, and begins to delve into the secrets of his past and his father's connection to the strange object known as the Mortmain that will allow the Resisters to defeat the Harsh once and for all.

The concept for this book was quite inventive, and I enjoyed the author's concept of a world in which time itself is in danger from antagonistic forces. The action moved along at a good pace, and although some of the scenarios were initially confusing, the reader learns more about the situation as Owen does, and things start to fall into place, leading up to a conclusion that closes up enough loose ends to be satisfying but leaves enough new possibilities open to be interesting.

Reviewed by Candace Cunard for TeensReadToo.com

This second book in McNamee's THE NAVIGATOR TRILOGY picks up a year after THE NAVIGATOR left off. Life has been easier for Owen since the defeat of the Harsh, but the Resisters' disappearance once the disaster was taken care of leaves him lonely. His friend, Cati, left to hold the position of Watcher and remain awake while the remainder of the Resisters slumber, feels the same loneliness; she can see Owen, but he cannot see her where she hides in the shadows of time, and she is not allowed to contact him except in the case of a great emergency.

Of course, such an emergency quickly appears. While talking with a girl at school, Owen sees her face change for a split second into that of an old woman. Cati witnesses a flock of geese quickly age and turn to skeletons before falling to the ground as dust. Cati attempts to wake the sleeping Resisters, but they will not stir. She enlists Owen's help, and together they are able to wake a small number of the resisters, including Dr. Diamond and the warrior, Pieta. Dr. Diamond determines that the strange happenings are a result of there being not enough time present in the world; this lack of time is interfering with the physical universe in strange and threatening ways, which will eventually result in the distortion of gravity and may cause the moon to come crashing down into the earth. Cati, Owen, and Dr. Diamond set off in search of the mysterious "city of time," Hadima, where legend has it that time was once bought and sold.

This book moves at a faster pace than the previous one in the series, and I enjoyed it more. It also makes use of more characters' perspectives from the very beginning, allowing the reader to see the story through the eyes of most of the main characters. The ideas behind the story in this novel are richer and fuller; now that McNamee has established the rules of his world, he begins to play around with them, introducing new settings and characters while elaborating upon old ones. It would probably be difficult to get the full emotional impact if these books were not read in order, but whether you read it on its own or as part of the larger trilogy, CITY OF TIME delivers action, adventure, and not just a little speculation about the nature of time and our place in it.

In explaining his work Eoin McNamee has said something along the lines of 'Whatever one thinks about conspiracy theories--that that doesn't mean there isn't such a thing as conspiratorial politics'. '12:23 Paris 31st August 1997' takes on the most famous car wreck of the 20th century--the one that killed Princess Diana and her boyfriend (fiance) Dodi Fayed along with their driver Henri Paul and treats it in fictional terms not as an accident but as a politcal assassination. Saying that--there is a number of reasons to speculate that it indeed was an assassination made to look like an accident. For instance the cameras tracking traffic through the Alma tunnel going black several minutes before the crash. The mysterious movements of the real life photographer James Andanson (a man with some very dark past connections) and his white Fiat--along with his mysterious death 3 years later. One might also reasonably argue that Diana had long been estranged from the British royal house and that marrying someone of Arabic descent probably did not sit well with much of Britain's aristocracy which has always had strong ties in the military and intelligence communities within Britain.

All of this factors into McNamee's book which really in a way brings real life culmination to two of J. G. Ballard's most famous works--Atrocity Exhibition and Crash--in which the rich and extremely famous are targeted for spectacular death via more often than not motor vehicle accident. McNamee's prose style also bears some resemblance to Ballard's--the almost meticulous over objectification of the human eye as camera. McNamee mixes in the real with the specualtive. One of his characters--John Harper--has in his file the murder of a young teenager in the Kincora School scandal which references a real event. The method of Diana's assassination apparently was taken from an intelligence position paper (CIA?) in 1992 targeting then Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic. So reading this 'fictional' work might give the reader the uneasy feeling that sometimes fact and fiction are not really always that far apart.

As well this fits like a glove into McNamee's past bibliography of speculative thrillers that walk the line between fiction and reality. McNamee's interest in the sometimes ghoulish brutality of psy-ops first made an appearance in 'Resurrection Man' and later in 'The Ultras'--both concerned with Northern Ireland during the troubles. Truthfully I think these books are wonderfully written and realistically drawn--whether or not all the truths of the events described ever really come to light. In any case give the secrecy that surrounds events like the Kennedy assassination or Diana's car wreck I think they our fair game unless and until the truth about them really does make an appearance.½

John Creed is the nom de plum of Eoin McNamee (whom I have reviewed for The Ultras, Resurrection Man, and The Blue Tango), a fine Irish writer (there is even a passing, early reference to Robert Nairic, the main character in The Ultras). The Sirius Crossing is different than the books written as Eoin McNamee: less detailed, less focus on human and social interactions and relationships, more emphasis on fast-paced action. Jack Valentine is a British secret service operative given the job of retrieving evidence related to operations by American Special Forces in Ireland, twenty-five years earlier. Some interests want the evidence found for the power it would confer in controlling powerful people, those powerful people themselves want it destroyed; Jack is in the middle of this and becomes a target for both groups, with the added complication of a very close friend being hunted by Irish killers for his alleged betrayal of the cause. Creed depicts well the murky, immoral, amoral world of clandestine operations where no one is to be trusted, everyone seems to have a hidden agenda, and where life is cheap, but where a rigid code of honour can even reach across political divides. A good read.

This is an excellent novel by a fine writer. The story is based, loosely, on the life and death of a Special Forces Captain, Robert Nairac, who left a bar in 1977, in the company of three men, and was never seen again, nor was his body ever found. Nairac, at least in the novel, is a larger-than-life, shadowy figure who works hard at perfecting a mysterious persona, a mythic personality. Twenty-five years later, ex-Sergeant Blair Agnew, who knew Nairac, dedicates his wasted life to trying to figure out what happened to Nairac; an obsession that is probably the only thing that keeps him going. Agnew himself was a peripheral player in the shadowy world of special forces and competing intelligence agencies, a man with a failed marriage, no career prospects, no core beliefs, a man described by his anorexic daughter as having real expertise only in the “field of weak promises and shallow commitments”.

McNamee conveys very well the indistinct world of the counter intelligence war, a war characterized by many competing agencies and individuals with ill-defined objectives and constantly shifting alliances that can, at times, even cross the lines between friend and foe, a war of clandestine military actions, a world of vaporous lines of communication and responsibility, a world of rituals and talismans and of roles played and imposed but with no moral core, a world of metaphor and enigma and riddles, a world where events and directions seem, in their own mad logic, to have their own life forces, their own ineluctable movements and outcomes beyond the ken and control of the men who think they are masters of the moment. In this, I was struck by parallels to the writing of Dennis Johnson in Tree of Smoke, describing the confusion of purposes and actions of the war in Vietnam.

As one of the protagonists says, “There were complaints from GCHQ that there were too many organizations on the ground and that they were interfering with each other’s work. Knox didn’t agree. He encouraged the entry of other branches into the field. It was important to have inter-agency rivalry, people working in layers, laying false trails for each other. Groups of highly trained men stumbling across each other at night. Knox knew that confusion was important. A sense of unstable government was vital to good intelligence work. You wanted there to be shifting patterns, shadowy alliances, overtones of corruption and sexual scandal.” Or, as Agnew himself realizes at one point, “That was what Robert and the others did. They created secrets and forced everyone to live in them. That was what scared him. The knowledge of clandestine governance, the dark polity.”

This is the third book I’ve read by McNamee (in addition to Resurrection Man and The Blue Tango) and I see repeating characteristics and themes. One is McNamee’s psychological acuity in exploring the weaknesses, guilt, and destinies of individuals and how they interact with others at various levels and in various circumstances. Another is the psychology of confession that does not stop people from doing dark deeds, but drives them towards the absolution, not necessarily of repentance, but of being known, of playing a role consonant with self-images that impose certain requirements. Another is the idea that events have a force and direction and meaning in and of themselves, beyond or apart from the motives of the people that initiate and think they control the interactions.

And then there is the beauty of McNamee’s writing, in particular his use of metaphor in the best manner of unexpected juxtapositions that illuminate. Some examples:

“…he was willing to sit back and watch nurses leaving the hospital, the white of their uniforms stark in the gathering dusk. You had the sensation of signals coming through, systemic in darkness, of semaphore.”

“The bird [a buzzard] moved sideways along the perch and stepped on to his arm with an odd delicacy, something Robert would come to notice in the birds, the way they displayed what seemed like a murderous fastidiousness.”

“The words had a bitter outline, but there was an absence in the way she spoke them that robbed them of malice. She ran her fingers over the seam of the T-shirt and turned it over again as if she could enfold apprehension within it. “

There is more to this book: metaphors of sight and blindness, of the wasting of Agnew’s anorexic daughter. McNamee’s world is stark and there is no redemption, but he does a masterful job of exploring it. Recommended reading.

This is McNamee’s first novel and one can see why it made his name as a writer to watch. The novel is set in Belfast which is described as “cold, functional, ghostly”---an apt description of the tone of the novel itself, but potential readers should not be deterred because the writing is wonderful.

Victor Kelly is a Protestant (though with the possible taint of that Catholic name, Kelly, the most grievous insult anyone could throw in his face) who grows up hard to become head of a small gang of killers known as the Resurrection Men who specialize in slitting the throats of Catholics picked up on the streets; not entirely at random as each kidnapping is well planned, but random in that the only real criterion is that the target be Catholic. That, however, is the end of the randomness as the subsequent torture, mutilation, murder and staging of the corpse are meticulously planned for maximum pain and maximum impact. The novel also follows the parallel lives of Ryan, in particular, and Coppinger, two journalists who write about the knife-murders and whose lives cut across those of Kelly and his men.

The novel feels like an abstract painting that is all straight lines, triangles and oblongs of various sizes, colours and shapes that overlap and intersect, a painting of sharp corners and boundaries that everywhere define life and death. Belfast itself is like a character in the novel as we see its economic growth and decline, its increasing despair and dismemberment into sectional retreats. The boundaries of the streets t fix denominational enclaves that determine life and death if, for instance, you were to find yourself accidentally where you should not be. And life lines define one’s existence, in an unbreakable, iron cage: “It was a question of assembling an identity out of names: the name of school attended, the name of the street where you lived, your own name. These were the finally tuned instruments of survival."

The trajectories of the lives of Kelly and his men are straight lines to death or imprisonment with overlapping shapes of allegiances and betrayals. They style themselves as protectors of Protestants against the depredations of Catholics, and for this they are respected, and a little feared, in their community, but without the religious cloak, Kelly and his men would be ordinary thieves, pimps, racketeers, and murderers; these are not innocents led astray. I have to think hard to recall any truly positive human relationships in the novel: Kelly is estranged from his father and even fantasizes slitting his throat when he one day shaves him after his father has had a stroke; Ryan becomes a heavy drinker, is estranged from his father and divorced; Coppinger is a loner who drinks and smokes himself into an early grave; Heather, Victor’s girlfriend is buffeted by forces and events of life from which she cannot break free. And yet there is this fetish of motherhood: one killer has to leave the scene of a murder early because he promised to take his mother to the shops, but none of them has a real, human relationship with his mother. In fact, they are all arrested, infantile development, sociopaths. Only the violence gives them focus and motivation.

Lest all of this sound too depressing to read, let me assure that it is not. The story is bleak, but the telling is clear and the writing is very good. McNamee writes in a very simple, declarative style but his writing is characterized by two powerful currents. One is his insights into what I would call the psychologies of persons, of motivations, of relationships, of social and personal expectations, of roles to be played. This even extends to the psychology of places:

“It was the first time Heather had been inside a courthouse. It was not what she expected. McClure told her that this was part of the mystery of courthouses. They are not what you expect. You look for authority in a courthouse, the exercise of prerogative. This is where the small acts of human deceit and betrayal are given latitude, where they should be played out in terms of motive, consequences. The dark benches, the archaic procedure designed to give you the drama you feel you are owed from your life, the feeling that you are acting on behalf of something great and shadowy. “

The other current is the writing in the use of inventive, insightful and often surprising similes and metaphors.

“Victor would look at him then but he would have put the shout away like it was something he’d sneaked on to the terraces under his coat and was afraid to use again.”

“They would come in and sit on the edge of the sofa. Big Ivan looked miserable and contrite. His eyes kept travelling to his big hands as if they were something uncouth which had followed him in.”

“And it was the women who lay awake at night listening to sand hissing in the caravan chassis and to children making sounds in their sleep to complement that sound, so that they felt a parent’s faint dread at their children’s access to the windlblown and strange.”

“He realized that a name was accomplished and haunting, and that having read them he could not divest himself of them but they would come to him again like an old pain coming intact through the innuendo of years.”

A writer well worth reading.

This is the first thing I’ve read by McNamee and it is very good. It is 1952 and nineteen year old Patricia Curran has been brutally murdered (37 stab wounds), her body found, by her brother and father, on the drive up to her house. Patricia comes from a prominent family…her father is a well-known judge and her brother a rising prosecutor who is also a religious nut….but Patricia is a promiscuous young woman involved with both single and married men so her relationships at home are strained, to say the least. The novel opens with Patricia’s death but this is not your ordinary murder-mystery. We follow the investigation with the local police, supplemented by a senior London policeman brought in to finish off the case, and we learn more and more about the family and a host of other characters in the small town.

We also learn early in the novel that the wrong man will be convicted for the crime and the guilty party (or parties) from the family will be protected from even the most cursory investigation that would have revealed their guilt….when the local police arrive at the murder scene they are told that the judge does not agree to their searching the house itself and no one questions this. This only gets worse as the proper instincts of the local police detective are suppressed and the investigation, especially with the arrival of the London detectives, becomes a purely political affair marked by complicity, duplicity and incompetence. As one of the characters describes it, “…being swamped with the uneasy sense of corruption and trespass that seemed poised to envelope the whole affair.” McNamee portrays very well the racism, xenophobia, homophobia and sexism of the time, all the more amazing because these were so casual in this time and place; casual in the sense of being unremarked upon, simply being the way that things were.

The murder-mystery and investigation provide structure to the book, but this is really a novel about the complexity and drama of human and social relations. As one character comments, “you did not need to bring mystery with you when even the simplest of human transactions was knee-deep in perplexity.”
McNamee is a fine writer with a keen eye for character and the interplay of interpersonal relations, for the striations of society, for the human strengths and weaknesses and complexities of character and the moral ambiguities and compromises that cut across those striations, for the rationalizations and excuses that people tell themselves in their self-images, for the power of those with place and authority versus those who simply know their place and must submit to survive, for the exercise of power by the powerful to protect one of their own with any sense of justice be damned.

Almost everyone jumps on the bandwagon of badmouthing Patricia and her loose ways, finally depicting her less as a victim than someone bound for trouble and whose life could only be expected to lead to this end. It is ironical that the only person who refuses to engage in this and who will have nothing to do with demeaning her reputation is the loan shark who has been supporting the judge with loans, against his property, to cover gambling losses.

McNamee has a wonderful sense of simile and description, for example:

“It was an era when women in blonde wigs were featured lying naked across the covers of cheap paperbacks. Now they seemed forlorn but at the time they seemed magisterial in their ability to replicate glamour, and he found himself content to accept the leery collaterals of their faked magnificence.”

And this description of the local policeman looking at knives for sale in a department store, “to see if he could find a knife that fitted the pathologist’s description of the blade that killed Patricia. However, the blades he saw seemed to mandate a finesse in the matter of flesh, whereas he was looking for a knife that was short on lustre but possessed perhaps of a crude but reliable killing ability.”

An excellent novel.

Two novellas set in Ireland (I know this because the back of the book told me, not because either of the novellas did) both contain a lot of senseless death and a lot of grimy sex. By 'grimy' I mean that I think everyone having sex in either story could end up catching more diseases from the places they choose to do it in than from their partner.
Also, the style of the writing seems poetic for the sake of discussing terrible and gross things in the most pulchritudinous language possible. The descriptions dance around the objects they seek to identify so that each sentence is a puzzle the reader has to figure out before it makes any sort of sense. To be honest, it made my head hurt. And, once I realized what the author was saying, I didn't want to have known it. Also, some of it just never made any sort of sense to me. "A wife's kiss is the sound of Betty Grable's heart broken with frost in the night." What?½

Of all the fin de siecle deaths, none has elicited the hysterical, self-indulgent, almost masturbatory orgasm of primal grief that marked the passing of Diana, Princess of Wales.

On the 10th anniversary of her death, the long-suffering world has once again been subjected to an outpouring of rehashed tributes, tales, theories and photographs of the self-styled ‘Queen of Hearts’.

Eoin McNamee is a renowned writer of fictions based on fact and it is hardly surprising that 2007 saw his take on the ‘assassination’ of Lady Di: the difference between McNamee and the al Fayed School of conspiracy theorists is that 12:23 is, unabashedly, a novel.

The book is remarkable not only for its realism and the quality of the research but also for the spare yet lyrical tone of the writing, bringing starkly to life the timeline which concluded in the Alma Tunnel in Paris, when ‘that night’s histories reeled away into myth’.

McNamee scrutinizes the five days before the fatal accident from several points of view: the omniscient reader is privy to all the forces that cause Henri Paul, a man renowned as a skilled driver with excellent responses, to chauffeur the Mercedes into a fatal collision.

We are allowed a glimpse at a complex web: there is the former Special Branch man Harper, recruited by his one-time handler, Bennet. Adjacent to him is Grace, who once held a minor post in British Intelligence, also recruited by Bennet.

Contracted to keep a watching brief on Diana during her brief stay in Paris, the three become aware of other more sinister forces which have also converged on the City of Light in the dog days of the year, including a seedy over-the-hill photographer, who drives a white Fiat Uno…

Sex, stupidity, sleaziness, greed and blackmail are the elements that, to a greater or lesser extent, determine the fate of every one of the characters – from ‘Spencer’ herself and the hapless al Fayed boy to Furst, the mad South African hired killer.

Some have celebrated this anniversary by gleefully plunging venomous knives into Diana’s spectral back, while most have hurtled eagerly down memory lane to enjoy another cathartic fest of weeping and tooth gnashing.

But 12:23 does neither: it is the story of the assassination of the Princess of Wales, it revolves around her, she is the centre of the action – but it is not about her at all, she is just the catalyst.

A sentimental tale about the minor tragedies of unimportant lives, yet the writing is never sentimental and seldom sympathetic: it presents an interesting hypothesis and realistic characters, but avoids positing any ‘answers’ – an excellent read.

First in a series. Concerned with the flow of time and an evil group trying to destroy it. The Navigator is the boy "chosen to save the world". Pretty good book... got a little laborious about 3/4 of the way through, like the author lost his pace... but it picks back up and finishes off well.½

Owen is in his secret den when he notices a change in light. Going outside to investigate, he discovers a man in uniform gazing toward Johnston's scrapyard. Across the river, a figure dressed in white appears, raises a hand and lets out an inhuman cry. Upon hearing it, the uniformed man turns, sees Owen, takes him by the arm and tells him to hurry - "they have a lot to do." So begins Owen's adventure as he discovers an entire population of people at the abandoned Workhouse. They have been awakened once again in the fight against the Harsh - white-clothed beings who can turn the world into a empty, frozen wilderness. The race is on to save the world as time flows backwards. The tool, called a Mortmain, needed to reverse this condition rests with Owen, who has been chosen by birthright as the Navigator. The only problem - Owen has no idea where it is nor what it looks like.

Set in Belfast at the beginning of the troubles this book has two main characters the most central one is a Victor Kelly, a protestant who is suspect to other protestants because of his catholic last name. Kelly is a sadist and fond of gangster movies. He is also very sensitive to the insult of being inferred a catholic. As he comes of age he becomes the leader of a protestant terror gang who kidnap, torture and kill their victims--to wit my dating of it to the early part of the troubles as the story seems to concur with events that occured in those times--such as most evidently the Romper room murders, a series of very brutal killings abetted by members of British intelligence who also brought to the conflict, media manipulation and a variety of forms of thought control--including via drugs and sexual slavery. In any case they are side by side with our Victor here at least for most of the book. As these horrific murders take place 2 journalists--one a catholic, Ryan (distracted and hurt by his wife having left him) and the other Coppinger, a protestant (sick and dying of cancer) begin tracking Victor and his gang. Eventually Victor's keepers will wash their hands of him and Victor will then find himself in the unfamiliar role of a victim. This is a very suspenseful and violent novel about a dark period in Irish history. McNamee has a keen ear and eye for the unusual word or phrase that will give his lines extra emphasis. The understated tone in fact often might seem to slow the pace a bit and I found myself surprised the first time I read it how actually quickly it moved along. This writer has talent and this book is an excellent place to start if one wants to find out more about it.½