This Irish bad-boy thriller – set in the hardest streets of New York City – brims with violence, greed, and sexual betrayal.
"I didn't want to go to America, I didn't want to work for Darkey White. I had my reasons. But I went."
So admits Michael Forsythe, an illegal immigrant escaping the Troubles in Belfast. But young Michael is strong and fearless and clever – just the fellow to be tapped by Darkey, a crime boss, to join a gang of Irish thugs struggling against the rising Dominican powers in Harlem and the Bronx. The time is pre-Giuliani New York, when crack rules the city, squatters live furtively in ruined buildings, and hundreds are murdered each month. Michael and his lads tumble through the streets, shaking down victims, drinking hard, and fighting for turf, block by bloody block.
Dodgy and observant, not to mention handy with a pistol, Michael is soon anointed by Darkey as his rising star. Meanwhile Michael has very inadvisably seduced Darkey's girl, Bridget – saucy, fickle, and irresistible. Michael worries that he's being followed, that his affair with Bridget will be revealed. He's right to be anxious; when Darkey discovers the affair, he plans a very hard fall for young Michael, a gambit devilish in its guile, murderous in its intent.
But Darkey fails to account for Michael's toughness and ingenuity or the possibility that he might wreak terrible vengeance upon those who would betray him.
A natural storyteller with a gift for dialogue, McKinty introduces to readers a stunning new noir voice, dark and stylish, mythic and violent – complete with an Irish lilt.
This knockout punch of a thriller from a critically acclaimed author follows a young Cuban detective's quest for vengeance against her father's killer in a Colorado mountain town
A man is killed in a hit-and-run on a frozen mountain road in the town of Fairview, Colorado. He is an illegal immigrant in a rich Hollywood resort community not unlike Telluride. No one is prosecuted for his death and his case is quietly forgotten.
Six months later another illegal makes a treacherous run across the border. Barely escaping with her life and sanity intact, she finds work as a maid with one of the employment agencies in Fairview. Secretly, she begins to investigate the shadowy collision that left her father dead.
The maid isn't a maid. And she's not Mexican, either. She's Detective Mercado, a police officer from Havana, and she's looking for answers: Who killed her father? Was it one of the smooth- talking Hollywood types? Was it a minion of the terrifying county sheriff? And why was her father, a celebrated defector to the United States, hiding in Colorado as the town ratcatcher?
Adrian McKinty's live-wire prose crackles with intensity as we follow Mercado through the swells of emotion and violence that lead up to a final shocking confrontation.
Denver, Colorado: a pretty, clever young girl working for an environmental charity, Victoria Patawasti is sleeping peacefully, unaware that she has barely an hour to live. As her killer slips into her apartment and draws a revolver in the darkness, Alex Lawson wakes up in Belfast. Twenty-four, sickly, and struggling to kick his heroin habit after a disastrous six-month stint in the drug squad of the Northern Ireland police force, Alex badly needs a chance to get back on track. Victoria was his high school love, and when he finds out she has been murdered, he volunteers to help Victoria?s family hunt down the killer. But once in Colorado, Alex has a fight on his hands: wanted by both the Colorado cops and the Ulster police, and uncovering corruption at the highest levels of government, he can solve the case only if he manages to stay alive.
The heart-stopping conclusion to the Michael Forsythe Dead Trilogy, from the author who has been dubbed Denver's "literary equivalent of Los Angeles" Michael Connelly and who is poised to find a larger readership.
In this breathtaking sequel to Dead I Well May Be, "the most captivating crime novel of 2003" (Philadelphia Inquirer), the mercenary Michael Forsythe is forced to infiltrate an Irish terrorist cell on behalf of the FBI, confronting murder, mayhem, and the prospect of his own execution.
A superb collection of the year's most outstanding short crime fiction published in the UK. Jakubowski has succeeded, as ever, in showcasing the impressive breadth of crime writing, from cosy tales of detection to noir mayhem and psychological suspense and terror. There are puzzles to solve, nagging questions about the nature of the society in which we live, but, above all, there is an abundance of first-class entertainment. Last year saw a sixth Crime Writers Association Dagger award for the series – shared between Margaret Murphy and Cath Staincliffe – and an Edgar award for Peter Turnbull. All three award-winning stories are included in this volume. Lee Child makes his debut and there is a first story from Neil Gaiman, too, in Sherlockian rather than fantastical mode. Return offenders include Ann Cleeves, Phil Lovesey and Ruth Rendell, among many other familiar names. There are a number of newcomers to the series, too, including Nina Allan, Joel Lane and Lisa Tuttle.