I just finished reading The Cold Cold Ground, the first book in the “Detective Sean Duffy” series by Adrian McKinty. The book was published in 2012, and although I had never heard of it, it won a couple of fairly prestigious awards. A friend on Goodreads thought highly of it, so I decided to check it out. I love getting stuck into a good mystery series, especially when its setting and time period are a bit unusual.

This one takes place in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, at the height of “the Troubles,” which is to say when the country was a battleground for multiple nationalist groups on both sides of the Catholic / Protestant fence, against each other and also against the vilified British government. Sean Duffy is a police sergeant, a recent hire to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and a rare Catholic in a sea of Protestants. He doesn’t seem to hold his faith in particular esteem, but that fact doesn’t matter to the “Fenian” haters all around him, so he has a lot of proving of himself to do on two counts—being the new lad, and being an outsider.

Duffy doesn’t let it worry him overmuch, although he does do a daily check of the undercarriage of his car for bombs before he sets out each morning. It’s an odd period in history in which to set a police procedural because, with every street a potential hazard due to IEDs, gunmen, or just unemployed teenagers throwing cartons of milk and bricks at your car, it’s hard to concentrate on one particular crime. But Duffy does have a crime assigned to him, and it is itself an anomaly—it seems he may have a serial killer on his radar. He and his crew, nicely described and developed in the course of the novel, are investigating the deaths of at least two gay men who have been killed, mutilated, posed, and labeled by the murderer, as well as drawn to the police’s and media’s attention by a series of notes. Sean initially falls for the allure of the first serial case ever to crop up in Northern Ireland, but then begins to suspect there’s a deeper story that has little to do with a hatred of homosexuals and more to do with political undercurrents amongst all the players on scene.

The descriptions are first-rate, the characters compelling, and the action fast and violent, while the writing doesn’t suffer because of the pace. I enjoyed the story from beginning to end, but can’t help but note that this is not an ordinary police procedural. Although Duffy and his mates do a conscientious job of exploring all the clues (sometimes at great risk to themselves), the inferences Duffy then draws from them proceed mostly from his instincts and sometimes wild beliefs than they do from any evidence, which is sparse. The leaps of faith that he makes (and that the author apparently expects you to make along with him) are sometimes a mile (or would it be a kilometer?) too far. Add to that an ending in which Duffy steps far outside his persona as a policeman in order to obtain justice and this book doesn’t dwell very well within its subgenre. Nevertheless, it’s an engaging story, and based on it I would read another by McKinty.