| Description: |
|
Product Description
Pat Coyne is back. Injured in the line of duty, he is now out of work with too much time on his hands. Living alone, he's become more obsessive and volatile, developing a fetish for women's knickers. When a body washes up on the docks, the prime suspect is none other than the former Guarda's son, Jimmy. Like father like son, both Coynes are notorious for their sweeping spells of self-destruction. But while Pat's motives lean toward cleaning up the world's messes, Jimmy possesses a taste for mayhem. Coyne's estranged wife blames him, his mother-in-law berates him, and his therapist labels him psychotic. When a duo of criminal thugs try to kill his boy, Coyne decides that it's up to him to straighten things out.
Amazon.com Review
Penzler Pick, December 2001: Fans of Bill James and Ian Rankin will want to run, not walk, to get a copy of this gritty urban crime comedy set in a contemporary Dublin where even the likes of Pat Coyne is seeing a therapist. On leave from the police force after sustaining serious burns in the line of duty, he's forced to show up for sessions with one Ms. Clair Dunford to qualify for disability pay.
He wasn't taken in by her motherly approach--Coyne was thinking compensation as he answered her routine questions with the maximum degree of neurosis, presenting an alarming impression of total human wreck. Depression. Irrational fears. Memory loss. Lack of concentration. Post-traumatic stress disorder! By Jesus, Coyne had them all. There's more going on in Coyne's life. His wife, Carmel, has left him, and some small-time local crooks are trying their best to kill his son, Jimmy. Plus, no longer sworn to uphold the law, Coyne can watch a shoplifter with disinterested appreciation of her technique, then impulsively, and imaginatively, intervene to get her off the hook. It's a bloody, topsy-turvy world, he realizes, once he learns that she's a Romanian who has paid to be smuggled into Ireland. In the bad old days, before the country's economic miracle, people paid to get out--but nothing's sacred anymore, not even his own teenaged daughters' innocent flesh. Did Pat Coyne ever imagine he'd be the kind of dad who'd be ferrying his girls to get their belly buttons and noses pierced? A straight line does exist between the Romanian shoplifter and the corpse of poor Tommy Nolan, a harbor bum whose death by drowning Coyne knows wasn't an accident. Hugo Hamilton is in no hurry to draw that line in this sequel to the equally colorful Headbanger. What he prefers to do is prove himself once more a master of constructing sentences you find yourself reading again--even reading aloud--and relishing. --Otto Penzler
|
