The Good Life
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A young woman wants her share of the good life - but at what cost?
The fifth Inspector Minogue novel begins on Dublin’s Grand Canal. Long a favoured place for young lovers to take a romantic stroll, the canal banks have become a prime spot for drug deals and prostitution. Waters that harboured elegant swans now wash up syringes and dead bodies.
This is where Mary Mullen is found, her body battered and callously left to jam in a canal lock. She wanted ‘the good life,’ but after hooking up with the notorious Egan brothers, things spun out of control.
Minogue’s efforts to solve her murder plunge him into the depths of Dublin’s underworld, a maze of drug trafficking, pornography and prostitution. Every path seems to lead back to the Egans. The Murder Squad begins receiving frantic phone calls from a friend of Mary, a petty thief and drug user: he knows something but he’s terrified of both the Gardaí and the Egans.
The case is soon complicated by Minogue’s new partner Malone, a dyed-in-the-wool Dubliner whose twin brother Terry is an addict. Terry, about to be released from prison, is heading straight into the Egan’s deadly web.
The fifth in Brady’s superb police procedural series... an unwavering air of menace accompanies a brilliant depiction of the city’s slatternly underside - all of it riveting to the last page.’
- Kirkus Reviews (U.S.)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The brogues and the blarney are back in fine form, but this tale doesn't have nearly the restless energy of All Souls, the previous Inspector Matt Minogue mystery. Brady brings the contradictions of modern-day Dublin vividly to life. On the bank of the now badly polluted canal, upscale young men in flashy cars with mobile phones look for whores, and the short life of Mary Mullen, a working girl with a taste for the finer things, comes to an unpleasant end. A junkie named Leonardo, who survives on Coca-Cola, lager and fear, believes he's being sought in her death and wonders if he should give himself up. Mary was his friend, but his alibi isn't impressive: he was breaking into a parked Golf GTI. Matt, meanwhile, has a pregnant daughter, a flatulent slob of a superior and a hot-tempered subordinate with a criminal twin brother. The bad twin is a close crony of the pair of brothers who are Matt's prime suspects in Mary's murder. Leonardo's torment is tedious, and we learn next to nothing about Mary. The mood is as thick as Guinness, but the plot's as thin as weak tea.
