Review: BAD BLOOD by Brian McGilloway

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Bigotry and hate crimes provide the backdrop to Brian McGilloway’s Bad Blood (Corsair, €15.99), the fourth in his series to feature DS Lucy Black of Derry’s Public Protection Unit. In this fascinating snapshot of contemporary Northern Ireland, however, which is set against the impending Brexit referendum, the bigotry and hatred is no longer confined to sectarianism: Lucy separately investigates the intimidation of a Roma family on the Greenway Estate, and the murder of a young gay man, bludgeoned to death with a rock. Intolerance is the new normal, it seems, for ‘the community-sanctioned psychopaths defending their culture’ who maintain their stranglehold on their tiny fiefdoms. A compelling tale of twisted loyalties and betrayals, the story plays out in the mean streets and back alleyways populated by a lost tribe, long since poisoned and abandoned by their politicians, who wander the concrete wilderness following the faint echo of the long-promised ‘peace dividend’. The clean-living and morally sound Lucy Black may be too good to be true by the standards of today’s crime fiction as she pursues the truth through Derry’s claustrophobic labyrinth, but like McGilloway’s previous creation, DI Benedict Devlin, she represents the hope that things may change, and perhaps even for the better. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times’ crime column for June.