Skilful tale of a good cop with a big fist

BOOK OF THE DAY: The RisingBy Brian McGilloway, Macmillan, 357pp; £15.99

IN THIS crime novel, Inspector Benedict Devlin lives with this wife and two children in Lifford, Co Donegal. This is the part of the Republic to which they are referring in Northern Ireland when they say they’re “looking North at the South”.

Devlin operates from the Garda station in Lifford, which looks across the Border at the town of Strabane. Since this is present-day, post-Belfast Agreement Ireland, Devlin eases back and forth seamlessly between both jurisdictions in what are described as the Borderlands.

Drugs are a major problem in the Borderlands, with murky paramilitaries from Derry starting up vigilante groups in the Republic, ostensibly to clean up parts of towns such as Sligo, but in reality to gain greater control of the drugs market.

Devlin battles his way into a blazing barn to save a trapped man, only to discover the charred remains of a local drug dealer.

Other deaths follow quickly, and the puzzle of whose hand is behind them intensifies.

When a former female garda colleague – for whom Devlin has a soft spot – reports her son missing, and when a local drug pusher is suspected to be involved, the issue becomes personal.

Devlin, often criticised at work by a cantankerous boss straight from central casting, spends a lot of time smoking cigarettes and driving back and forth across the Border.

As he digs deeper and deeper through the layers that the vigilantes, drug dealers and their police connections have put down between them and the truth, the death count mounts.

At home, Devlin’s wife seems to think it’s OK when their 11-year-old daughter develops a crush for a boy of the same age who just happens to be the son of a local crime boss.

It’s little wonder, in the face of such domestic support, that the inspector finds it a relief to go out and whack the odd scumbag.

Devlin is a good cop with a clear sense of justice, a sharp brain and a big fist. When his personal life and the crimes he is investigating begin to merge, as we know they will, our sympathy and respect for him, never in doubt, become acute. The climax of this well-paced story is left dangling enticingly.

Having just slogged through the Stieg Larsson trilogy, mostly with enjoyment, it was nonetheless something of a relief to come upon a police thriller which is told in a bare yet skilful way and which does not lurch every hundred pages or so into political history.

Garda investigation and forensics techniques are well researched and written, but not bludgeoned home.

McGilloway has a healthy respect for his readers’ intelligence.

It is a slightly worrying sign of slipping editorial standards in a publisher of this quality to find the word “technically” spelt incorrectly, not once but twice.

Nor are spirits particularly raised when a man is described on a Wednesday as being “sandpapered with stubble”, whereas the day before he was said to be “bearded”.

The Risingis a provocative title for this novel, one of a series. The setting is also intriguing.

McGilloway has put the spotlight on a new phenomenon that is ripe for exploring – the overlapping of police jurisdictions across a Border that has the very Irish distinction of being both there and not there at the same time.

Peter Cunningham's new novel, Capital Sins, will be published in June by New Island