No. 4 in the series. I am not sure this was a good as 1-3, but it wasn’t at all bad. The central figure in this one is a minor figure in 3, which is part of her technique. These are very long books.
In this one, a family has been massacred in a shit modern middle class housing estate/complex just outside Dublin, built by developers exploiting the brief Celtic Tiger boom in the Irish economy. The houses have been knocked up on the cheap, and the few buyers that have moved in have mainly lost their jobs and any value in their properties and lives. A family is slaughtered, although the wife survives, just.
It becomes a failed/hubris detective novel: Scorcher Kennedy, the murder squad detective (as opposed to undercover cop in no.3) is fooled into believing that suspect no.1 must be the killer, despite doubts expressed by his more junior colleague. But he gets it wrong.
Not unlike Frank in no.3, he has a pretty fucked up family with a mother who committed suicide many years ago and a totally screwed up sister.
Good, but maybe (unsurprisingly) has some structural similarities to no.3 above.
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