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The Midnight Choir

di Gene Kerrigan

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1394195,287 (4.02)7
With moral dilemmas as Dublin emerges as a city of ambiguity: a newly scrubbed face hiding a criminal culture of terrible variety. Small-time criminals have become millionaire businessmen, the poor are still struggling to survive, and the police face a world where the old rules no longer apply.
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Mostra 4 di 4





Just for the character of Harry Synnott the book is worth reading. His recognition at the end regarding his failings comes dramatically and brutally, and I was left to ponder whether he would be able to deal with his self-realization. And then something happened. The story stopped suddenly so that I felt like I'd gone hurtling over a cliff. I had to check to make sure there weren't any pages missing in my tablet!

But when I came to think about it, I think the way the story ended is much more effective, because I was left wondering possible life paths for the characters.

In this book even the most despicable characters can convince themselves they are somehow doing the right thing, even when we know that it isn't the case.

This story is a good case to demonstrate what I’ve always felt. One of the distinctive pleasures of reading Crime Fiction or Speculative Fiction (or SF if you prefer) lies in its awareness of its own traditions and conventions. That's the beauty of it in my view. Is the best genre fiction intrinsically inferior to the so-called "literary" fiction? Not so. There's crap on both sides. A lazy writer can simply follow the genre conventions by the letter. The exceptional genre writers (SF or Crime Fiction) must be looking to subvert my expectations,ie, using the established frameworks to explore new territories or themes. Those are the writers I always look for (eg, Jo Nesbo comes to mind with his ability to constantly undermine my assumptions about characters and their motivations: he kills off central characters in the middle of his stories, for christ's sake).

This is my 2nd Kerrigan. He dolled out just the right amount of information to keep me hooked, but wasn't so stingy that I got to the end thinking he hadn't played me fair, which I was...

Gene Kerrigan is on the verge of becoming one of my favourite genre writers." ( )
  antao | Dec 10, 2016 |
Life sucks, then you die a gruesome, horrible death that changes nothing. But it's well-written, so that's something. ( )
  bostonbibliophile | Nov 6, 2013 |
The Midnight Choir is a big novel. I don’t mean in terms of length (the nine and a half hours listening time flew by) but in terms of its subject. Rather than focusing on a particular incident, investigator or criminal this book depicts a myriad of crimes perpetrated by an assortment of criminals and paints a giant canvas showing how and why crime happens. There are crimes carried out due to desperation, corruption, greed and a fervent belief it is the right thing to do and they interconnect at the most unexpected points.

In Galway a man is prevented from jumping to his death by a young Garda who must then try to find out how the man came to be covered in blood that isn’t his own. Meanwhile in Dublin a young mother tries to mug an American tourist at a cash machine while a seasoned criminal plans a jewellery robbery, hard man Lar MacKendrick gets back into the swing of killing people after the death of his brother and a young woman reports a date rape to Police.

At the centre of all of this is Detective Inspector Harry Synott who proceeds through these investigations as well as experiencing a series of flashbacks of incidents in his career which help explain why he’s not everyone’s favourite copper. Harry is a brilliantly complex character: struggling continuously with the question of whether justice can be served by the law. His particular demons are not easily dealt with and there are no nice easy solutions to his problems even at the end of the book but, love him or hate him, I doubt many readers could help but be gripped by his story. But if that isn’t enough to keep you glued there are several other equally compelling personal stories that will, if you’re at all like me, have you shifting from anger to sadness and back again at a rapid pace.

The story dealt with some uniquely Irish themes as well as the broader issues that are shared in big cities the world over so having the book narrated in John Cormack’s gentle Irish accent was a definite treat as it helped me get absorbed in the world that Kerrigan had created even more completely.

I’m not surprised to learn that Gene Kerrigan is a journalist who has reported on politics and policing in Ireland because The Midnight Choir definitely has an air of realism and also the pacing and storytelling of the best investigative journalism. If you like the way Deon Meyer depicts South Africa or Peter Temple describes Australia then I think you’ll love the way Gene Kerrigan shows us Ireland, warts and all. ( )
  bsquaredinoz | Mar 31, 2013 |
Dublin, Galway ( )
  janebr | Apr 18, 2011 |
Mostra 4 di 4
The most dispiriting cliché in crime fiction used to be the boring, characterless copper (usually wearing a gabardine and trilby), shuffling in to solve crimes committed by far more colourful criminals. The breed was consigned to the dustbin by a new kind of copper, who bends the rules to get the bad guy. This maverick cop soon calcified into cliché in its turn. So it's a cause for celebration that such writers as Gene Kerrigan (author of the acclaimed Little Criminals) can still produce something fresh and radical with the concept.
 
This is a fine achievement, one of the best crime novels of the year.
 
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This book is dedicated to Elizabeth Lordan
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It was just gone noon when Garda Joe Mills got out of the patrol car on Porter Street..
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With moral dilemmas as Dublin emerges as a city of ambiguity: a newly scrubbed face hiding a criminal culture of terrible variety. Small-time criminals have become millionaire businessmen, the poor are still struggling to survive, and the police face a world where the old rules no longer apply.

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