SuzanneRating:
Review
Journalist Dan Starkey is caught by his wife Patricia in a drunken embrace with another woman, and things spin out of control at the speed of light after that. Margaret, the other woman, is murdered within a day. Dan is pegged as the main suspect and finds himself on the run from the law and miscellaneous other people. Set in Belfast during a time which comes across as almost a war zone, all sides in the political conflict are quickly drawn into the story, from the Protestants to the Catholics to the terrorists. The tone is a little too flip for the violence involved, and Dan is vomiting drunk for the first 100 pages or so which made it hard to get through. Fortunately after that the plot really takes shape and gets more interesting as Dan desperately tries to decipher Margaret’s last words and figure out who killed her. There’s snarky, witty dialogue, and the last half was a lot better than the first, but taken as a whole I’d give it a miss.
Best Lines:
“Better than the other crap. Put that on my gravestone.” (page 16).
KimRating:Review
Set in Belfast during the tumultuous early 1990s, Dan Starkey is a journalist with a lot on his plate, starting when his wife catches him in a lip lock with another woman. His indiscretions do not stop there, and quickly his is wanted for murdering his new lover. Although he has a penchant for getting mixed up in sticky situations with dangerous people, Dan is a witty guy, making the dialogue laugh out loud funny at times, which turned out to be a good thing for this reader, since I found Dan to be somewhat unlikeable initially. He grew on me though. This story is fast paced and doesn’t shy away from violence, which was okay with me, but having been a tourist in Belfast recently and never living there, I thought a lot of the talk of hired guns, the IRA, and double-crossing bad guys would appeal more to someone that lives in or is from Northern Ireland than it did to me. Dan’s wily bantering with pretty much everyone is funny though, and I really liked the ending.
Best Line:
“My old dad would have called it mutton dressed as mutton.”.
