All Souls - Hardcover

Brady, John

3.81

53 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312097352 ISBN 13: 9780312097356

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1993

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Winter seems to have come early over Clare, Inspector Matt Minogue's home county on the west coast of Ireland. Soon it's All Souls Day, when the devout pray for souls' release from Purgatory. The morning fogs, the steady drizzle, the empty ocean close by - all form the bleak setting for Minogue's most peculiar investigation yet.
When Minogue returns to County Clare to help sort out his nephew's run-in with the law, a meeting with brilliant, eccentric IRA lawyer Alo Crossan convinces the inspector to stay for a while. Crossan wants Minogue to reopen the file of one Jamesy Bourke, a convicted murderer recently released from prison. The townspeople have scant sympathy for Bourke, who suffered a nervous breakdown - a lost soul indeed. Minogue himself is close to burnout, and this long-dead case strikes a chord in his beleaguered psyche. The inspector begins a quest, never guessing that he will be thwarted, mystified, and endangered in John Brady's most complex and moving novel to date.

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From Publishers Weekly:

Like stones enveloped in a thick Irish mist, Brady's images and characters take shape gradually. Gently placed between the harsh urban realities of Dublin and the harsh rural realities of an Irish farm community is Matt Minogue, the jaded homicide inspector of Brady's three earlier books, most recently Kaddish in Dublin . Minogue--with his brother disabled by arthritis and his nephew in trouble with the law--visits the family farm in County Clare, where the lands are in the grip of powerful business interests intent on driving farmers out and drawing rich tourists in. Minogue arrives near terminal burnout, but policing is never far away. A local solicitor wants him to investigate the plight of Jamesy Bourke who, once convicted of murdering a Canadian girl, has returned to the area after his release. Jamesy walks alone at night, talks to his dog and makes the natives nervous--especially the landowning families most eager to turn the place into a haven for yuppies. When Jamesy is killed, Minogue's investigations widen. Brady uses snatches of evocative language and a deliberately languid pace to bring County Clare into focus. For readers who bemoan the sometimes rudimentary literary skills of crime writers, Brady's Matt Minogue novels are a breath of air--occasionally pungent, but undeniably bracing.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Painful glimpses of past tragedies emerge when Dublin's Inspector Minogue (Kaddish in Dublin, etc.) returns to County Clare on holiday and is sandbagged into investigating the murder of Jane Clark, a crime from a dozen years back that led to the incarceration of Jamesy Burke. Recently freed, the now demented Jamesy is himself soon killed, and Minogue and his suicidally inclined aide, the despondent Hoey, are soon awash in tales and subterfuges plotted by a lawyer who specializes in IRA defenses; a weak politician ruled by testosterone and his vengeful wife; and locals--including members of the Guarda--deeply suspicious of men from Dublin. While Minogue keeps a watchful eye on the near-to- shattering Hoey and nicks away at past alibis and relationships, his own equilibrium badly falters in a violent bloodletting that not only unravels Jane Clark's last moments--and some current gun- running schemes--but unleashes Minogue's long-suppressed memories of the death of his infant son Eamonn. Excruciatingly intense study of men at the breaking point. If you can bear the emotional upheaval of the dark Irish soul put under this strong a microscope: a knockout. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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