This genre-spanning debut, based on true events that shocked Victorian Dublin, brings us inside the mind, and cell, of John Delahunt, a Trinity College student who faces the hangman’s noose for murder. But this is more than just another penetrating portrait of an upper-class killer in the tradition of John Banville’s Freddie Montgomery. Hughes also gives us a Kafkaesque rendering of the authorities at Dublin Castle as a sinister bureaucracy whose agents operate a clandestine network of paid snitches and dole out a warped version of justice. Delahunt, an unpromising student, is recruited into this web of informants. Unfettered by anything as inconvenient as scruples, he discovers he has an aptitude for this lucrative line of work, but he finds himself committing ever more sordid deeds as the Castle’s grip tightens. Unprepossessing Delahunt may be, but there is a guilty pleasure in following such an amoral antihero through Merrion Square salons, seedy back-alley bars and brutal interrogation cells. With its polished prose, vivid period feel and debauched protagonist, this assured first novel will be relished by fans of literary crime and historical fiction alike.
