The North Will Rise Again

Yon Norn Iron blokes have been busy lately. First up is Stuart Neville (right), who hasn’t been resting on the laurels garnered by his debut, THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST). Quoth the Scotland Herald:

Neville’s next novel, COLLUSION, is in part a sequel to THE TWELVE. It follows one of the minor characters from his debut, a policeman investigating his missing wife and child, but the novelist says the similarities between the new book and its predecessor end there. “The Twelve is about frustration, about knowing that people will never be held to account for what they did. COLLUSION will not touch on those issues. It has nothing to do with party politics or Stormont.”
  Decades of fatuous Hollywood IRA flicks may have given audiences Troubles fatigue, but there is now an appetite for understanding Northern Ireland. “I think the next 10 years are going to be a very interesting time,” Neville says. “You have to remember that great fiction never emerges until a conflict is over. Look at the Second World War: while that was going on, the only things coming out were propaganda films, but in the years after, it inspired so much. Part of the reason is that, after the fact, you don’t need to be so politically sensitive.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here. Meanwhile, COLLUSION is due in August, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

Former paramilitary killer Gerry Fegan wanders New York City, hiding from a past he escaped at a terrible cost. But he made a fatal mistake: he spared the life of Bull O’Kane, a ruthless man who will stop at nothing to get his revenge. Too many witnesses survived a bloody battle at his border farm, and now he wants them silenced, whether man, woman or child. O’Kane calls the Traveller, an assassin without pity or remorse, a killer of the purest kind. Back in Belfast, Detective Inspector Jack Lennon, father of one the witnesses, is caught up in a web of official secrets and lies as he tries to uncover the whereabouts of his daughter. The closer he gets to the truth about the events on O’Kane’s border farm, the more his superiors instruct him to back off. When Fegan realises he can’t shake off the trail of violence that has followed him across the world, he has no choice but to return to Belfast and confront his past. The Traveller awaits Fegan’s return, ready for the fight of his life. A fast-paced thriller about duty and revenge, COLLUSION is a blistering sequel to THE TWELVE, one of the most highly acclaimed debuts of recent years.

  Elsewhere, Garbhan Downey has just published THE AMERICAN ENVOY, even though it seems no more than minutes since he brought you THE WAR OF THE BLUE ROSES. Quoth the blurb elves:

Money ... Power ... Drugs ... Women. Just another day at the office ... Boston journalist Dave Schumann is in line for a major posting from the US Secretary of State. But instead, his big smart mouth gets him exited to Derry, the rainiest city in Ireland. There, the new envoy is forced to contend with psychotic drug smugglers, a leftie shock-jock who wants to burn him live on air and a renegade security team who are monitoring his every move. Schumann’s letters to his father and friends reveal his increasingly precarious – and hilarious – struggle to cope with the most thankless job on earth. And that’s before he discovers there’s a spy in the camp who has dark plans for the Presidential visit.

  Finally, and even though his novels are set in the South of Ireland, Brian McGilloway was born in Derry, which makes him a Nordie whether he likes it or not. The video below has Brian wibbling on about the latest in the Inspector Devlin series, THE RISING, which hits a shelf near you next month. Roll it there, Collette ...