You Can’t Handle The Ruth

Good news for Ruth ‘Cuddly’ Dudley Edwards: AFTERMATH: THE OMAGH BOMBING AND THE FAMILIES’ PURSUIT OF JUSTICE makes it onto Crime Always Pays’ long-list for the Longest Subtitle of the Year, alongside Fintan O’Toole’s SHIP OF FOOLS: HOW CORRUPTION AND STUPIDITY KILLED THE CELTIC TIGER. That both have also been nominated for the Orwell Prize, an award which recognises excellence in political writing, is a nifty little coincidence, as Irish Publishing News fails to report in its otherwise excellent coverage.
  Elsewhere, Marcel Berlins reviews Brian McGilloway’s THE RISING over in The Times. To wit:

“THE RISING continues Brian McGilloway’s excellent run of novels featuring Benjamin Devlin, the Irish Garda inspector. He unsuccessfully tries to save the life of a man trapped in a burning barn; the victim turns out to be a drug dealer. He’s called by a former police colleague whose 15-year-old son is missing; that too involves drugs. As the inquiries become more complex, Devlin is faced with a life-or-death crisis very close to him. Devlin bucks the crime-fiction trend by being just a good ordinary cop, a sympathetic family man without too many hang-ups or foibles. The novel is no worse off for that.” – Marcel Berlins, The Times

  Brian, by the way, will be launching THE RISING at the Verbal Arts Centre in Derry on Wednesday evening, the 31st, at 6.30pm, and all are welcome, but particularly those with an excess of cash and a keen interest in purchasing a very fine novel.
  Meanwhile, your humble scribe had a review of Louise Welch’s NAMING THE BONES published in the Sunday Business Post a couple of weeks back, which kicks off like this:

The conventional crime novel tends to unfold over three acts, but Louise Welsh’s fourth novel, NAMING THE BONES, is very much a novel of two halves. In the first half it’s an understated academic novel detailing the travails of Dr Murray Watson, a University of Glasgow English lecturer intent on reviving the reputation of a little-known poet, Archie Lunan, and solving the mystery of his death on Lismore Island 30 years before. Frustrated as he tries to piece together the scanty details of Lunan’s life, Watson is also the dominated party in an affair he’s having with Rachel, the wife of his department head ...

  For the rest, clickety-click here …