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GALLOWS LANE
by Brian McGilloway
Minotaur Books, September 2009
336 pages
$23.99
ISBN: 0312384327


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

As the story opens, Garda Inspector Ben Devlin, who first appeared several years ago in BORDERLANDS, is tasked with meeting a released convict, James Kerr, as he crosses the border from Northern Ireland to try to convince him to turn right around and go back where he came from. Kerr has won early release because he has got religion and convinced the authorities that he is intent on living a reformed life, but Kerr's boss is not so sure. "If Jesus knew that Kerr was looking for him, he would have hid." It's a throwaway line, but it does start a theme of potential redemption that will recur along the way.

The action of the novel takes place over barely three weeks, but in that space an alarming number of gruesome murders occurs, at least one of which is so horrific that it attracts national attention and the intervention of the NBCI, the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, something like the Republic's version of the FBI. Through it all, Ben finds his belief both in his judgement and in the wisdom of continuing as a police officer severely tested.

While in summary this might sound like a bog-standard (sorry) police procedural, what sets it apart is the main character, Ben Devlin. Though a troubled copper, he is not your heavy-drinking, failed marriage sort. Instead, he is given to rather alarming panic attacks which threaten to sideline him from duty altogether. His crisis is a crisis of faith in himself, his vocation, in the justice system itself. And what gets him through it, insofar as he does get through it, is religious faith, for Ben is a quietly pious man.

Like the earlier volume in the series, this is set on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, an area of shifting loyalties and a terrible, troubled history. A certain peace may have been established here of late, but amnesia has not taken hold and, especially for a law-enforcement officer, the past is not really ever quite over. Ben and his fellow Guards lack the absolute conviction of some other fictional officers, and it is this very tentativeness that makes them most interesting and very contemporary indeed.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, September 2009

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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