This Ain't Rock-n-Roll, It's Murder
The Midnight Choir, by Gene Kerrigan is an absorbing, beautifully written, gritty tale of Irish detection and corruption, full of believable characters and bleak Dublin settings.
Detective Inspector Harry Synott has blighted his career, and made enemies within the force, by publicly revealing that his colleagues had beaten up a suspect. He has retained that integrity, but added to it a quiet cynicism, and he is not above twisting the evidence himself to achieve a just result.
The Midnight Choir teems with moral dilemmas, Synott’s own and those of the criminal justice system that he serves but so often finds wanting. Dublin, too, emerges as a city of ambiguity, with its public face hiding a criminal underbelly of great variety and passion, atmospherically portrayed by Kerrigan as Synott moves from pathetic drug-ridden snouts to gangland chiefs, by way of a date rape and a robbery from a dodgy jeweller.
by Marcel Berlins
