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Gerry Fegan has killed many in his career as IRA hitman, but is haunted by twelve of his victims for whom he is determined to get justice by despatching those who ordered the hits. With a cease-fire established and peace negotiations continuing, Northern Ireland is largely free of the terrorist attacks that marked its history for decades. Young people go about their daily lives, never having been "torn from sleep by a bomb blast in the night, the force of it hammering their windows like a thousand fists, freezing their hearts in their chests," as Gerry Fegan, the protagonist of Stuart Neville's debut thriller observes, with a tiny shiver of resentment. For peace may have settled, if uneasily, over Belfast, but it seems to have missed Gerry. Fegan is a former IRA hitman, seven years out of the Maze and drinking heavily. He is never alone, however, accompanied by twelve ghosts of the innocents he killed. Deep into the bottle, he concludes that the only way to be rid of them is to kill those who ordered or facilitated the hits in the first place and who walked away clear. So he sets about methodically going after them and as he succeeds, he gradually divests himself of one of his ghosts after another. At the start, this would appear to be a fairly obvious metaphor, a kind of Rutledge and Hamish times twelve, but as Fegan goes about his quest, it becomes clear that the men he is after are now in positions of considerable power and his campaign is likely to have enormous political repercussions, threatening the peace process and toppling the government. So Fegan must be stopped. It's an interesting concept and a bitter, even cynical, one that strips away all the sentimentality that might yet cling to the militant struggle of the IRA. "Sooner or later," says Fegan, "everyone pays," and sooner or later almost everyone does. But this is a first novel, and Neville does not seem to have complete control over his material, which is a pity. The book wanders away into a flurry of violence that blunts the point and the novel limps off to a rather peculiar conclusion. Ken Bruen has provided an enthusiastic blurb for the jacket, proclaiming that "Stuart Neville is Ireland's answer to Henning Mankell." Not yet he isn't, but he might become so if he can adopt something of Bruen's own uncompromising spareness the next time out. This first appeared in the UK as THE TWELVE.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, October 2009
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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