Review: NORTHERN HEIST by Richard O’Rawe

Previously the author of three non-fiction titles, including Blanketmen, former Provisional IRA press officer Richard O’Rawe makes his crime fiction debut with Northern Heist (Merrion Press), in which James ‘Ructions’ O’Hare sets out to pull off ‘the biggest heist in Irish history’ by knocking over Belfast’s National Bank of Ireland. Set in 2004 – the year of the Northern Bank robbery – the novel offers a driving plot teeming with colourful characters, as Ructions, as per the sub-genre’s conventions, schemes to pull off the fabled one last job. It’s a tense tale – the IRA and the newly formed PSNI are both keeping tabs on our anti-hero – but where Northern Heist really scores is in the human detail, and particularly in terms of the interaction between the professional criminals and the bank staff kidnapped to facilitate the robbery. The stakes might easily have been raised had O’Rawe delivered more of the wider political context – the likely impact of the robbery on the Good Friday Agreement, for example, receives only a brief mention – but otherwise Northern Heist is a pulsating tale of vaulting ambition and establishes Richard O’Rawe as a crime novelist to reckon with.
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Publication: NORTHERN HEIST by Richard O’Rawe

Previously the author of the nonfiction titles BLANKETMEN and IN THE NAME OF THE SON: THE GERRY CONLON STORY, Richard O’Rawe publishes his debut novel NORTHERN HEIST (Merrion Press). Quoth the blurb elves:

When James ‘Ructions’ O’Hare put together a crack team to rob the National Bank in Belfast in December 2004, even he didn’t realise he was about to carry off one of the biggest bank heists in British and Irish history.
  And he’ll be damned if the Provos are getting a slice of it.
  In Richard O’Rawe’s stunning debut novel, as audacious and well executed as Ructions’ plan to rob the National Bank itself, a new voice in Irish fiction has been unleashed that will shock, surprise and thrill as he takes you on a white-knuckle ride through Belfast’s criminal underbelly. Enter the deadly world of tiger kidnappings, kangaroo courts, money laundering, drug deals and double-crosses.

  For more on Richard O’Rawe, clickety-click here …