Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly by Adrian McKinty
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Several years ago I chanced upon "Dead I Well May Be" by Adrian McKinty, a novel about a Belfast ex-pat, Michael Forsythe, becoming embroiled in New York gangland, a slice of violent noir, with wonderful dialogue, with the action punctuated with poetic, almost mystical passages. The book and the author quickly became favourites. I read the complete "Dead" trilogy and the rest of McKinty's work and, five years ago, began to follow his new trilogy set in 1980s Belfast. "The Cold, Cold Ground" introduced Sean Duffy, a Roman Catholic in a predominantly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary. The books are all five-star, the series uniformly excellent, McKinty one of the best crime-writers currently writing. But nothing has usurped "Dead I Well May Be" - until now...

"Police at the Station...", the sixth in the Duffy trilogy (take that "Hitchhikers..."), may be the best novel Adrian McKinty has written to date and it deserves to be widely read. Duffy, a little older, perhaps slightly wiser, has undergone some life-altering changes since the end of the last novel and is struggling to get used to being a father and nearly-husband. Meanwhile somebody is murdering drug dealers with a crossbow.....

As with McKinty's previous work, the story is filled with snappy, authentic dialogue and the investigation brings Duffy, and his loyal team, McCrabban and Lawson, into contact with real-life 'Troubles" in Belfast, in this case the terrible aftermath of the March 1988 SAS shooting of an IRA team in Gibraltar which led to rioting in Northern Ireland, Michael Stone's attack on the IRA funerals and the televised lynching of two British Army corporals. But, again as usual, there is also a lot of humour in the book as well as Duffy's love of literature and music - he is listening to a lot of 20th Century classical this time around and at one point memorably, and correctly, characterises the 1980s pop-music as “anodyne, conformist, radio-friendly bollocks, lacking in soul, grace, intelligence or joy.”

Adrian McKinty is a literate and intelligent writer of clever and exciting crime thrillers and, despite being completely wrong about Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival" and putting the irritating "I'd of.." in Duffy's mouth twice in this novel, should be on any self-respecting crime fan's to-read list well ahead of any amount of Scandi-bollocks and James Patterson's weekly output.

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