It should come as no surprise that fiction’s most agile fixture, the most able to adapt to real-time changes in the actual world, would be the hard-boiled detective. The recession may have blighted the landscape of Ireland with closed factories and shuttered businesses, but cop Bob Tidey “Is in the law and order business, and whatever else went belly-up there’d always be hard men and chancers and a need for someone to put manners on them.” Bob’s counter-point in THE RAGE, the third crime novel from Dublin-based Gene Kerrigan, is low-life recidivist Vincent Naylor. Fresh out of jail on an assault charge, Naylor has decided that the next time he goes to jail “it would be for something worthwhile,” such as the heist of an armored car. There are other characters that you might expect to see, like the nun with the powerful secret, but the pleasure in reading Kerrigan is in his unwillingness to let his characters line up along moral dichotomies; the baddies are still plenty bad, but the good guys aren’t always that good.
