McKinty is pointing to the fact that perceived reality and fiction in conflict zones are equally untrustworthy. Death-squad acronyms are switched from one side to the other. It's an uneasy technique, but there is an integrity to it. Here Gerry Adams makes an appearance, a seedy loyalist takes on the persona of dead loyalist George Seawright, and its not much of a leap from McKinty's Freddie Scavanni to Freddie Scappattici, the infamous informer Stakeknife.

What's real and what isn't collide in the corpse-murk of hidden wars, and narratives are shaped to take account of it.

The material seems to lend itself to side-of-the-mouth invective, the sly one-liner. The detectives are wisecracking and self-aware. He is one of a new generation of writers from the north who use the tools of the crimewriter's trade to examine and reshape the recent past. The Cold Cold Ground is Adrian McKinty's 12th novel. But in this northern endgame the murky undercurrents flow in unexpected directions. The missing wife of a hunger striker appears unrelated. The discovery of another body seems to confirm the existence of a homophobic serial killer. That's until Detective Sean Duffy starts to notice errant details about the corpse, such as the fact that the severed hand deposited with the body belongs to someone else. When a body turns up on waste ground, one hand severed and placed on its chest, overstretched detectives are inclined to regard it as an informer killing and consign it to the file marked unsolvable. The melancholy procession of dead hunger strikers from the gates of Long Kesh has begun, and tension on the street is at breaking point. It's the beginning of the end, but it doesn't feel like it. If (('gtm=off') const isAppRedirect = ('appRedirect') Ĭonst isAndroid = /Android/i.test(erAgent) Ĭonst isIphone = /iPhone|iPad|iPod/i.test(erAgent) Add to this the fact that, as a Catholic policeman, it doesn’t matter which side he’s on, because nobody trusts him, and Sergeant Duffy really is in a no-win situation.

It’s no easy job-especially when it turns out that one of the victims was involved in the IRA but was last seen discussing business with someone from the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force. Detective Sergeant Duffy is the man tasked with trying to get to the bottom of it all. Hunger strikes, riots, power cuts, a homophobic serial killer with a penchant for opera, and a young woman’s suicide that may yet turn out to be murder: on the surface, the events are unconnected, but then things-and people-aren’t always what they seem. “McKinty is one of the most striking and most memorable crime voices to emerge on the scene in years.” -Tana French Fast-paced, evocative, and brutal, The Cold Cold Ground is a brilliant depiction of Belfast at the height of the Troubles-and of a cop treading a thin, thin line-from The New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award-winning author Adrian McKinty.

The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty