Dark Times in the City

Starred review from September 23, 2013
U.S. readers will welcome this outstanding crime novel, a 2009 Gold Dagger Award finalist, from Irish author Kerrigan (The Rage). Danny Callaghan, out of prison for seven months after serving eight years of a 12-year sentence for manslaughter, has kept clean since his release, driving for his friend Novak, who owns the Blue Parrot pub in Dublin. When Callaghan impulsively comes to the rescue of a patron in the pub targeted by two gun-toting thugs, the crime boss who ordered the hit, Lar Mackendrick, retaliates by forcing the ex-con back into the life under threat of killing those closest to him. Kerrigan’s spare, incisive prose depicts an Irish underworld and a population caught in a closed circle of poverty and violence; short, brutal lives are the norm, and drugs offer a dangerous bridge between the haves and the have-nots. As one disillusioned policeman puts it, “We’ve managed to create a lot of young thugs who know nothing about life except how to take it.” Callaghan makes a memorable attempt to escape in this superb standalone. Agent: Peter Straus, Rogers, Coleridge & White (U.K.).

November 15, 2013
One moment, Dublin ex-con Danny Callaghan is minding his own business; the next, he's back in the cross hairs of both cops and criminals. Recently released from prison after a nine-year stretch for manslaughter, Danny, 32, is grimly determined to stay out of trouble. But fate intervenes when prematurely gray Walter Bennett appeals for help during his drubbing by a pair of leather-jacketed thugs in a pub. Almost instantly, Danny curses himself as a blasted idiot for stepping in, even as he wonders why anyone would want to kill the feckless Walter. As Danny has feared, his scuffle sparks interest from police and local gang members. Pub owner Novak, who sympathizes with Danny, lies ineptly to DS Michael Wyndham when he's questioned about the incident. And lady's man Karl Prowse, whom Danny bested, has an awkward debriefing with his boss, kingpin Lar Mackendrick (a central figure in Kerrigan's debut novel). Before long, the police interest in Danny and Mackendrick naturally puts Danny in the hot seat with both groups. Unfortunately for him, Walter is not the innocent victim that he played for his rescuer. All this threatens Danny's budding relationship with the levelheaded Hannah. And once he has his toe again in criminal waters, is there any turning back? Kerrigan's fourth crime yarn (The Rage, 2013, etc.) captures a landscape of moral ambiguity with a crackling pace and terse, apt dialogue. His world suggests an Irish Elmore Leonard whose compromised men struggle to tread water in a treacherous sea.

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Starred review from December 1, 2013
Following The Rage (one of Booklist's top 10 crime novels of 2013), Kerrigan delivers another spare, cut-to-the-bone noir in which a well-meaning ex-con finds himself trapped in the vice of circumstance. Danny Callaghan is having a beer in a Dublin pub when two armed men barge in, seemingly intent on killing another of the pub's patrons. Danny instinctively intervenes, saving the intended victim's life but winding up in the middle of a gang war between two of the city's drug lords, one of whom has unfinished business with Danny. In the aftermath of the incident, Danny realizes that no oneneither the drug lords nor the cop investigating the casebelieves that his involvement was purely coincidental. So begins the doomed attempt of a good man to get out of harm's way. Danny, unfortunately, has an Achilles' heel: he can't just walk away; he's compelled to set things right, to even the scales. But the scales in recession-ravaged Dublin are set permanently askew. It's a classic noir setupcomplete with the disaffected wife and child with whom Danny longs to reconnect, though his every move makes reconciliation even more impossiblebut Kerrigan manages to inject new vigor in the formula, not with any surprise plotting (there are no surprises in noir) but with the crispness and submerged power of his understated prose. Kerrigan's grasp of contemporary Dublin and its underworld denizens puts him shoulder to shoulder with the best Irish crime writers (Ken Bruen, Benjamin Black, Declan Hughes), but his mix of noir and poetry also suggests another emerging superstar from a different continent, Urban Waite (The Carrion Birds, 2013).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)