In the Morning I'll Be Gone arrives

In the Morning I'll Be Gone is a fine name for the final novel in a series — if indeed this third of Adrian McKinty's "Troubles" novels is to be the last appearance of Sean Duffy.  The book is out in North America and in audio form this week, and it's well worth your time, as are its predecessors, The Cold Cold Ground and I Hear the Sirens in the Street.

I like the series' very human, non-dogmatic, non-polemical view of an everyday cop's life in Northern Ireland in the early '80s. The sense of what it might have been like to live in those times is vivid but, more than that, convincing. This goes especially for the books' homely details and the off-hand observations by Duffy, a Catholic member of the mostly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary. Among other things, McKinty, a longtime friend of Detectives Beyond Borders, would make a hell of a tour guide to Belfast and McKinty's own home town of Carrickfergus.

Like the first two novels, In the Morning I'll Be Gone abounds in good jokes and in popular-music references a good deal better than most such references in crime fiction. Unlike Books One and Two, In the Morning ...  reminds me in a small way of Dashiell Hammett's story "Fly Paper." It's no wandering daughter job but, like Hammett's story, McKinty's novel embraces a hoary murder-mystery motif and works it with great success into a story that is far from a traditional mystery.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014