Black Irish A novel

Review by New York Times Review

When it comes to great settings for a crime novel, there's no place like home. For Stephan Talty, that's Buffalo, which he has made both the locale and a major character in his first thriller, BLACK IRISH (Ballantine, $26). As viewed by Detective Absalom (Abbie) Kearney, lately returned to care for a father whose mind is going, Buffalo is a decaying place, sunk in despair, haunted by its illustrious past. "The whole city was entombed by the artifacts of its glory days," she observes of the disintegrating waterfront, the bankrupt mills and "silent" smokestacks, the highways built for a population long gone. And nowhere is this sense of loss more keenly felt than in the section where Abbie grew up, "a patch of Ireland in the wilds of America" known as the County. "Some parts of the neighborhood never changed. The clannish logic. The hostility to outsiders. The secret, ancient warmth. The alcoholism." But while attitudes may have remained inflexible, the County has hardly escaped the passage of time. Drugs are in the schools, families are on welfare and churches have been abandoned, including St. Teresa's, which Abbie attended as a child - the same church where the mutilated body of Jimmy Ryan has turned up in the basement. As the adopted daughter of a revered local cop, Abbie is familiar with the strict social protocols observed in the County. But as someone who moved away and only recently made her way back, armed with a fancy college degree and a refined accent, she'll always be an outsider. None of these clannish people, who bear "an ancestral memory of being oppressed in a country they'd never been to," trust her on this murder case, which escalates into unspeakable savagery as the bodies pile up. The technical police work is not very convincing, and by placing Abbie and her family at the heart of the mystery, Talty limits his detective's objectivity. But there's something hypnotic about the voices heard up and down the streets and in holy places like the Gaelic Club, "the mother ship of the County," which was once the setting for dances and weddings and rowdy political gatherings. Now it's the scene of its own wake, a sight that strikes Abbie as unbearably sad. But, as the bartender observes, "anything that's dying's beautiful for a while." "No one likes a woman who knows how to kill with her bare hands." Brigid Quinn, the unconventional heroine of Becky Masterman's first novel, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING (Minotaur, $24.99), learned that lesson in her former career as an undercover F.B.I. agent. Nowadays, if anyone should ask, Brigid will say she investigated copyright infringements, since she's a fanatic about guarding her secrets from the new husband she adores. Although Brigid is determined to enjoy her early retirement in laid-back Tucson ("which everyone told me was a lovely place but that felt a lot like Siberia, only hot"), it's just her bad luck to attract a killer rapist who claims "older broads" as his "specialty." Still in fighting shape at 59, Brigid is one old broad who is tough to kill. So tough she accidentally kills this creep. Unfortunately, in her panic to cover up the deed, she alerts another maniac cruising the old Route 66, which for serial killers is "kind of like the Appalachian Trail, only paved." Brigid wears her age well, and she makes it work for her too. She knows people would like to think that as they get older "all women must get suddenly serene, their anger draining away with their estrogen." Some do, some don't. So, take her or leave her, "this is Brigid Quinn, a woman of a certain age, raging." Legal mysteries would be much more enjoyable if they didn't have self-aggrandizing lawyers in them. Lachlan Smith makes tidy work of neutralizing that problem in his first novel, BEAR IS BROKEN (Mysterious Press/Grove/ Atlantic, $24), by introducing us to Teddy Maxwell, a San Francisco attorney with the reputation of being "about as crooked as a lawyer can be." Sadly, this wonderful rogue (possessed of "a brilliance realized most fully in its decadent form") is shot in the head while having lunch with his kid brother, Leo. While Teddy lies in a coma, Leo, who's just passed his bar exam, does a respectable job of representing his brother's thuggish clients. He's also well on the way to nailing Teddy's attacker when Smith gets all tangled up in an unnecessarily complicated ending. Overplotting is a beginner's mistake, but Smith doesn't write like a novice. He'll surely get the hang of it next time. The free-for-all in DONNYBROOK (Ferrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $15) is a "three-day bareknuckles tournament" that a rich and sadistic patron of the arts holds on his 1,000-acre spread in rural Indiana. In Frank Bill's brutally funny first novel, fighters come from miles around to bash one another's brains out, until the last man standing is awarded a cool hundred grand. Among the brawlers and sports fans making the trek to this backwoods battlefield are Jarhead Earl, a lovable lug from the hills of southeastern Kentucky; Ali Squires ("Bare. Knuckle. God"); and Chainsaw Angus, a mad-dog meth dealer who, with his sister, Liz ("pure poison"), makes up a tag team of killers. Fun is fun, but Bill is also keeping track of the human fallout: the "children hanging from mothers anchored by out-of-work fathers" who live in "rotted houses and beat-down trailers" on country roads, waiting for the meth dealer to show up. A scene that could definitely make you want to fight. Stephan Talty makes the city of Buffalo both the locale and a major character in his first thriller.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 24, 2013]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Detective Absalom Kearny of the Buffalo (NY) PD is caring for her aged, adoptive father, John, a legendary, former detective himself. Smart and driven, Abbie is seen by fellow cops as a rising star. But she may be too driven, and the savage torture-murder of Jimmy Ryan, a resident of the city's clannish Irish enclave, the County, drives her toward obsession. More grisly murders occur, and even though Abbie grew up in the County, no one will talk with her, even though many know what is happening; the County avenges its own. Talty, author of several lauded nonfiction books (Agent Garbo, 2012), has produced a suspenseful debut novel with a circuitous plot. Abbie is a wonderfully complex and conflicted character, but it is the County which may exist in Buffalo and certainly exists in other northeastern cities that shines brightest. It's a place where a boy whose people came from Mayo isn't allowed to date a Kilkenny girl, and its residents share an ancestral memory of being oppressed in a country they'd never been to. Economically ravaged Buffalo is portrayed in broader brushstrokes, but the sense of place is palpably evocative. Black Irish is simply a riveting read.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Talty's first foray into crime fiction, a memorable story of betrayal and vengeance, centers on a working-class Irish enclave in contemporary Buffalo, N.Y. The macabre killing of gas-meter reader Jimmy Ryan brings Det. Absalom "Abbie" Kearney to South Buffalo (aka "the County," as in the 27th county of Ireland), where "ancestry was everything." As the adopted daughter of legendary cop John Kearney, Abbie is both an insider and an outsider. More gruesome, carefully staged deaths occur, pointing to members of the secretive, powerful Clan na Gael as targets. Hampered by community distrust, Abbie must dig deeply into long-buried secrets that could endanger her father's life and reputation as well as her own life. Talty (Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day) does a fine job portraying the cohesiveness of the Irish, their loyalty to one another, and their obsession with their history. Agent: Scott Waxman, Waxman Leavell Literary. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Best-selling historical chronicler Talty's (Escape from the Land of Snows; The Illustrious Dead) first novel follows Det. Absalom "Abbie" Kearney as she aggressively hunts down a serial killer in the insular, forbidding city of Buffalo. There a deformed psychopath is decimating the ranks of a mysterious Irish club with ties to the IRA. Though the writing is deeply descriptive and there is a carefully crafted atmosphere of despair, implausibility reigns. From Abbie's lone-wolf procedural approach to her stumbling onto her father's involvement, things are too far-fetched. The maudlin tone and overreliance on South Buffalo's near-mystical Irish history further detract. Despite the limiting material, first-time narrator David H. Lawrence XVII works wonders, gracefully differentiating characters in a clear, resonant voice. VERDICT With delivery this good, odds are that many fans of thrillers will overlook the book's flaws. ["To say this book is an utterly compelling read would be an understatement, although the necessary background information on the Irish Republican Army and Gaelic groups is a bit dense for readers unfamiliar with the subject.... Fans of exciting and unpredictable thrillers will add this one to their must-read list," read the more enthusiastic review of the Ballantine hc, LJ Xpress Reviews, 3/15/13.-Ed.]-Douglas C. Lord, Connecticut State Lib., Middletown (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Talty harnesses his nonfiction skills to craft a novel that's centered on a feisty female cop in a history-rich Irish enclave in upstate New York. Absalom Kearney, adopted daughter of legendary Buffalo police detective John Kearney, has returned home to care for her rapidly declining father. Abbie, as she's known, worked as a police officer in Miami. She's been back for a year and has already established herself as the best homicide investigator in the BPD. When Abbie and her partner, "Z," catch a missing persons' case that turns out to be the tip of a serial killers' iceberg, she gets a chance to prove how good she is. The victim, Jimmy Ryan, a perpetual nonachiever who was tortured and left dead in an abandoned church, was discovered with a toy plastic monkey near his body. When someone tries to enter the home Abbie shares with her dad and leaves a similar toy on the doorknob, the female cop realizes that she's up against more than simply a clever killer. She tracks members of a secret Irish organization while chasing the murderer across her county and into neighboring Niagara Falls, all the time putting herself in harm's way. Talty shows his chops when recounting the area's Irish roots, but the first half of the story is sluggish. The relentless grimness of the setting, hopelessness of the local economy and general ineptness of other police officers combine to create a lackluster atmosphere populated by characters that lack both depth and vitality. That in itself could be forgiven if Talty's plot revealed brilliant detective work, but it doesn't. Instead, Abbie comes across as unreasonable, dismissive of her co-workers, and abusive to both other cops and suspects alike. Readers can be forgiven if they find Talty's story stretches credulity a bit, especially in the bloody second half. This Buffalo-based novel turns out to be more notable for its area history, moody setting and occasional smart turn of phrase than for the thuggish heroine.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter One Detective Absalom Kearney took the exit for the Skyway and the Ford nosed upward, climbing with the gray asphalt. Lake Erie was frozen over far below and to her right; to her left, Buffalo's industrial waterfront slept as quiet and still as an oil painting. The factory smokestacks rode past, even with her windshield, but not a smudge of smoke drifted up from them. The waterfront was dead, slumbering for the past three decades. When Absalom used to ride along this part of the highway with her father twenty years before, she'd sometimes hear the smokestacks keen as the storm winds hit them. She rolled down the window. The smokestacks were silent. The squall hadn't peaked yet. The crest of the road was ahead, only slate-­colored sky beyond. Three stories up, the Skyway was a ribbon of concrete spilled across the clouds. The wind shook the car with a guttering rattle. Abbie gripped the wheel harder. She felt the fear grow inside her again, blooming like a growing rose in a sped-­up film. She took the Skyway every time she had to go to South Buffalo instead of driving down the 90, where the highway hugged the earth all the way to the exit at Seneca Street, by the junkyard that seemed to hold the same hundred wrecked cars she'd seen there as a child. Abbie told herself she took the road above the lake because she wanted to face the thing that terrified her. Which was what, exactly? White tendrils of snow skimmed ahead of her Ford Crown Vic, pushed by the wind. The front edge of the storm was blowing in, spinning a spiderweb of frozen lace on the asphalt. Her eyes followed them as the road rose. Endlessly intricate patterns, hypnotic to watch them form and break, form and break. There were no cars up ahead, not a single red brake light in the tall, rippling curtains of snow. The empty highway made her think that if she moved the wheel just two inches to the right she would put the car into the railing. A lull, the bang of ice, and then water. Lake Erie in January was a freezing tomb. Death in fifteen minutes. She'd looked it up, whether to calm herself or scare herself she had no idea. She could almost hear the snow crystals scour the asphalt. They made a rough, hissing sound that grated on your eardrums. It was like the shushing of a dogsled heading into blankness, disappearing into the advancing storm . . . Abbie leaned and turned up the radio, which the last detective had tuned to a country station and which she hadn't bothered to change. She found the University of Buffalo station playing some obscure eighties synth music. When she told her partner Z about how odd she felt driving Buffalo highways, he'd asked her why. She'd brushed it off then, but now she knew. It's the emptiness. The enormous emptiness. Or the loneliness, that was it, the feeling of being alone in a place that should be filled with other people, cars full of families headed to the super­market, to the restaurant on the lake, to the hockey game. Buffalo had built miles of highways during the boom years, enough for a million people. The people that were going to come but didn't. Why not? Where'd they disappear to? What happened to them? Now the gray roads splayed across the city, empty half the time. The local joke was the only way Buffalo would get a rush hour was if Toronto got hit by a nuclear bomb and panicked Canadians came pouring south. You could drive for twenty minutes at a time at three on a weekday afternoon and not see another car pass you. The highway system was a network of veins laid across a dead heart. But she couldn't talk about those things, because eyes were already on her. She'd only been in Buffalo PD for a year. At thirty-­one, she was already on her second police job. If she messed this up like she did Miami . . . The radio crackled. "Detective Kearney, this is Dispatch. McDonough wants to know your ETA." A missing persons case in the County. Must be a family with some connection to the Department, because the missing guy had only been gone since Monday. Just two days. And the officer on scene had called in to check on Abbie's progress, making the family think their missing son or daughter was a priority. Usually, they would just ask the family if Danny or Maura preferred crystal meth or alcohol. She kept her eyes on the yellow line as she reached to pick up the handset. The radio was mounted far enough away to give legroom for a bigger person--­that is, one of the sprawling six-­foot men that the Department seemed to breed, not the average-­sized Abbie. Finally, she hooked the cord with a French-­polished fingernail and brought the handset up. "Kearney to Dispatch," she said in a husky voice. "Twenty minutes." "Ten-­four." She descended down the back slope of the Skyway, the lake ­coming up on her right and then the raggedy little marina where her father had liked to fish in the spring. Next to it were the hulking grain elevators, massive concrete silos that, like all the old mills down along the waterfront, had been empty for decades. It used to be that ships filled with golden wheat from the West would come steaming into the harbor and unload their haul. The West grew it, and Buffalo milled it. Now the companies were bankrupt and kids with Irish pug noses and no concept of mortality fell to their deaths after breaking the silo locks and climbing up the inside on the rusty maintenance ladders. There wasn't that much else to do in the County on a Saturday night. There'd been one just last week, a seventeen-­year-­old boy named Fenore who'd wanted to impress his porky girlfriend, who they found crying hysterically at the foot of the silo. Abbie had done one recovery and that was enough. The insides of the things smelled like rancid beer, and at the bottom, always the broken bodies. Abbie had begun to think of them as sarcophagi, twenty-­story vertical tombs facing out to the lake like some kind of postindustrial pyramids, the bones of the young inside. The whole city was entombed by the artifacts of its glory days. She jumped off at Tifft Street, grinding the front wheels into a left turn, and shot off through the nature preserve. Coming to South Buffalo was coming home, she guessed. But a little half-­Irish girl from outside the neighborhood could never have been at home here, even if she'd been adopted and raised by a legendary Irish cop, the great and terrible John Kearney. Certainly not a girl with an unknown father, who'd given her a shock of midnight-­black hair, what they called Black Irish in the County. And if that wasn't enough, Harvard grads like Abbie were regarded as nothing less than two-­headed aliens. They called South Buffalo the Twenty-­Seventh County, or the County for short, a patch of Ireland in the wilds of America. Blacks need not apply; strangers, be on your way; and faggot, can you outrun a bullet? Back in high school, her neighbors the Sheehans hadn't even let that poor redheaded kid John Connell come on their porch to pick up their daughter Moira for the freshman dance. Not because he was Italian or German or, God forbid, Puerto Rican, not because he was too poor or addicted to alcohol or sexually suspect or pockmarked by acne. No. It turned out his family was from the wrong part of Ireland, Abbie's friends patiently explained to her afterward. The Connells were from Mayo and the Sheehans were pure Kilkenny. "D'ya get it now? He's the wrong county; the Sheehans won't have a Mayo boy on their doorstep." Their faces shiny with concern, emphatic that she should understand the intricacies of Irish-­American dating. "Yep," she'd told them. "I get it now." Inside, she'd thought, Looks like I can forget about getting a date in high school. And she'd been right. Her raven-­black hair, which was only accentuated by her pale skin and sky-­blue eyes, her long-­dead drug-­addicted mother, and her unknown father had doomed her to a life as an outsider in the County, where ancestry was everything. She remembered the moment as the beginning of her disastrous romantic history, and probably her sharp tongue, too. That had been in the nineties. Things were different now, people said. There were even a few blacks and Latinos sprinkled among the County's population, though you never seemed to see them walking the streets. Maybe they carpooled for safety and conversation. But some parts of the neighborhood never changed. The clannish logic. The hostility to outsiders. The secret, ancient warmth. The alcoholism. As her partner, Z, said whenever someone from this part of the city did something completely inexplicable or self-­destructive: "WATC." "We are the County." No other explanation necessary. Or possible. Excerpted from Black Irish by Stephan Talty All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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