The Midnight Choir

January 22, 2007
The current Irish economic and real estate boom forms the backdrop for the assured second novel from Irish journalist Kerrigan (after Little Criminals
). Any smalltime hood with an entrepreneurial bent and a workable scam can quickly work himself into the ranks of the millionaires produced by the boom, forcing police departments all over the country to scramble to keep up. In Dublin, Det. Insp. Harry Synnot, a man with an acute sense of morality and justice, is working a rape and a jewelry store robbery, manipulating his snitch, Dixie Peyton, and being groomed for a job in the Serious Crime Department of Europol. Meanwhile in Galway, policeman Joe Mills is investigating a mysterious double murder, probably committed by a man he's just rescued from a rooftop suicide attempt. While much of the fun is in puzzling out unfamiliar words like "gurriers" and "gaff," it's Kerrigan's firm control of the procedural genre and the breathtaking twist he gives his plot that show him to be a master of the form.

March 15, 2007
A dour Celtic copper does duty in a capital city in the British Isles and runs afoul of the authorities while working with (and sometimes against) his colleagues. No, it's not a new Ian Rankin novel but a "Garda procedural," the first publication to appear in the United States by award-winning Irish newspaperman/novelist Kerrigan (Little Criminals ). The story is set in what is clearly the "new" Ireland, the preserve of all things on the way up: Bono, Ryanair, and any number of shiny new solicitors. Slogging his way through a seemingly mundane rape case, Det. Insp. Harry Synott of Dublin feels that he, too, has earned his promised promotion up the ladder to Europol. At his side is Det. Garda Rose Cheney, who is able to tick off the astronomically rising cost of real estate in the Irish capital. It turns out, though, that the island is as tight as ever, with the rape case having repercussions throughout Irish society, from down-and-out Dixie Peyton to its higher echelons, from Dublin to Galway. Kerrigan gets the midnight choir humming in an intricately plotted novel that can safely be mentioned in the same breath as those by Rankin. For all larger public libraries.Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2007
The title of this crime novel might remind you of Joseph Wambaugh's " 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. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)