POLICE AT THE STATION AND THEY DON’T LOOK FRIENDLY

Fiction

In the grip of The Troubles

POLICE AT THE STATION AND THEY DON’T LOOK FRIENDLY

A Detective Sean Duffy Novel

By Adrian McKinty

320 pp. Seventh Street Books

Reviewed by Eric Petersen

Irish crime novelist Adrian McKinty is back with another quirky thriller featuring his most popular character, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy. Previous entries in the series, Rain Dogs and Gun Street Girl, are also reviewed on this site.

Belfast in the 1980s. Ireland is in the grip of The Troubles, the nearly 30-year conflict between Irish Nationalists seeking independence and Loyalists who support the British government.

Catholic Nationalists and Protestant Loyalists are killing each other left and right. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), a militant Irish Nationalist group, is waging an escalating campaign of terrorism, including a bombing that nearly killed the hated British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet.

Amidst this chaos, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) – the only Catholic in the Protestant Northern Irish police organization – tries to keep the peace. The brilliant, eccentric, wisecracking detective enjoys good whiskey, good weed, and, being an avid record collector, good music.

The novel opens with a prologue where Duffy is taken to a remote location in the middle of the night by masked gunmen and forced to dig his own grave. Duffy then tells the story of how he ended up in such a horrific situation.

As the story begins, Duffy, his girlfriend Beth, and their baby daughter Emma are visiting his parents in County Donegal when he receives a phone call from his colleague, Detective Sergeant “Crabbie” McCrabban. A drug dealer has been murdered. As homicides go in Northern Ireland, it seems like nothing special.

The Troubles aren’t Ireland’s only woes. There’s an epidemic of drug abuse in the country. It’s become such a problem that the warring Catholic and Protestant paramilitary organizations have assembled vigilante task forces to exterminate drug dealers who sell to kids. Neither faction trusts the police to solve the problem.

By turning vigilante, the paramilitaries can protect children from drugs while at the same time making big money dealing drugs themselves (to adults) and engaging in protection rackets. The most famous, or rather, infamous paramilitary organization is, of course, the IRA.

But this particular murder – a small time drug dealer shot twice with a crossbow on the street in front of his house – doesn’t sound like the work of paramilitaries. And it’s the second such murder in a few days, so it could be the work of a serial killer.

When Detective Inspector Sean Duffy arrives, he finds that his bumbling underlings have lost control of the crime scene, which is being contaminated by a small crowd of looky-loos – and a goat. He’s shocked to learn that the victim Frank Deauville’s wife stabbed the policeman who tried to pry her away from the crime scene.

Since Deauville’s wife, Elena, is a Bulgarian who speaks badly broken English and has difficulty understanding the language, Duffy gets an interpreter from the Bulgarian embassy to assist him. In cases like this, the spouse is always the prime suspect, and what little evidence there is suggests that Elena, her husband’s drug mule, is most likely his murderer.

After interrogating her, Duffy becomes convinced that Elena is not the murderer, but knows who is, and is protecting the guilty party out of fear. Then an anonymous benefactor bails her out of jail and she vanishes without a trace. She doesn’t leave the country – she just vanishes.

As he digs deeper, Duffy begins to suspect that the murderer of Frank Deauville, his wife, and the other drug dealer isn’t a serial killer or a paramilitary soldier, but someone else. Someone who’s ruthlessly silencing people who know too much...

Duffy’s determination to catch the killer is complicated by personal crises. First, during his police physical, he’s diagnosed with asthma. The doctor prescribes inhalers and orders him to cut down on the whiskey and cigarettes, or he’ll be placed on restricted duty. If he tests positive for marijuana again, he’ll be fired.

Then he has a row with his girlfriend when she tells him that she can’t stand Ireland anymore and wants them to move into a nice house in Scotland built by her wealthy father and given to them as a gift. He detests her father, a bigoted Protestant who refuses to allow his daughter to marry a Catholic, forcing Duffy to violate his religious beliefs by living with her and their child in sin.

The couple reconciles, but when assassins storm their home and try to kill them, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy must face what he’s suspected all along – a deadly conspiracy of corruption, depravity, and murder that reaches into both the IRA and the highest levels of his own department…

Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly is another crackling crime thriller from Ireland’s master of crime fiction, Adrian McKinty, featuring his distinctive style of jazzy prose laced with deadpan comedy. Highly recommended!

Eric Petersen is an administrator and blogmaster for the Internet Writing Workshop, an international, online writer’s group run out of Penn State University. You can reach him by e-mail at EricPetersen1970@hotmail.com