All Souls
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- ¥500
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- ¥500
発行者による作品情報
The murder of a tourist a decade ago has left open wounds. When an outsider begins to question the past, it changes everything.
The fourth Inspector Minogue mystery opens on a drizzly October in Dublin: Minogue is daydreaming of Greece’s blue skies. His plans for a trip there are suddenly dashed: Hoey, his partner in the Garda Murder Squad, has tried to kill himself. To compound Minogue’s problems, family duty calls. His nephew has been arrested for suspected IRA gun running.
At the Minogue family farm in west of Ireland he meets a colourful lawyer, and is coaxed into unofficial digging into an old murder case.
Along with the groggy Hoey, he is soon enmeshed in the case of that murder victim, Jane Clark, and her lover, Jamesy Bourke, the half-crazed poet and local eccentric who was convicted of her murder. After years of electroshock, Bourke’s memory is returning. What he remembers is causing more than just unease.
Just as the past is another country and Hallowe’en opens the world to chaos, Minogue enters a hidden Ireland. Part shaman, part cop, part innocent abroad, he picks his way through an ancient countryside still haunted by forgotten peoples, into a dark past that mocks his efforts to make the past reveal its secrets.
‘Excruciatingly intense study of men at the breaking point... A knockout.’ - Kirkus Reviews (U.S.)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like stones enveloped in a thick Irish mist, Brady's images and characters take shape gradually. Gently placed between the harsh urban realities of Dublin and the harsh rural realities of an Irish farm community is Matt Minogue, the jaded homicide inspector of Brady's three earlier books, most recently Kaddish in Dublin . Minogue--with his brother disabled by arthritis and his nephew in trouble with the law--visits the family farm in County Clare, where the lands are in the grip of powerful business interests intent on driving farmers out and drawing rich tourists in. Minogue arrives near terminal burnout, but policing is never far away. A local solicitor wants him to investigate the plight of Jamesy Bourke who, once convicted of murdering a Canadian girl, has returned to the area after his release. Jamesy walks alone at night, talks to his dog and makes the natives nervous--especially the landowning families most eager to turn the place into a haven for yuppies. When Jamesy is killed, Minogue's investigations widen. Brady uses snatches of evocative language and a deliberately languid pace to bring County Clare into focus. For readers who bemoan the sometimes rudimentary literary skills of crime writers, Brady's Matt Minogue novels are a breath of air--occasionally pungent, but undeniably bracing.
