Review: Bad Blood

Bad Blood by Brian McGilloway
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Brian McGilloway is invisible, and that is a rare talent for a writer. There are writers, many of whose work I love, who sacrifice plot for beautifully constructed passages that warrant re-reading for the pleasure of the words; there are others for whom plot is everything and who sell millions of copies despite clunky, painfully overwrought writing. McGilloway is a storyteller who, over the course of several novels, has consistently delivered entertaining, densely plotted crime stories which simultaneously comment on current affairs, particularly post-Troubles Northern Ireland life; all without such comment getting in the way of the story. He never preaches – there are enough preachers in Northern Ireland – but, while his stories flow in a way that almost makes you forget you are reading, McGilloway is also holding up a mirror to some of the events and people still holding the country back.

‘Bad Blood’ is set in the week leading up to the Brexit referendum. The discovery of the badly beaten body of a young gay man brings DS Lucy Black into contact with a community full of suspicion and intolerance – not just the sectarianism so long prevalent in Northern Ireland society but also prejudice against homosexuals and immigrants, prejudice stirred up by firebrand preachers and ex-paramilitary community ‘leaders’.

“In Northern Ireland, you can’t have your cake at all if you’re gay…”

McGilloway’s characters are fully realised. They may have stereotypical views but there are no stereotypes. The loyalist leaders, feuding among themselves, may garner little sympathy but McGilloway captures perfectly the very real concerns in the working-class estates that keeps such figures in positions of influence. “I see the end of our culture”, says the preacher. “We’re not allowed to march. We’re not allowed to fly our flag…. This peace dividend? They never told us it was for the middle classes only. They never said that the poor would stay poor.”

The threads running through ‘Bad Blood’ come straight from the headlines in a Northern Ireland where politicians are more concerned with arguing the right of a bakery to discriminate against gay people for ‘religious’ reasons than they are with forming an effective government; where paramilitary organisations drive out ‘foreign’ drug dealers only to protect their own monopolies; where dissenters are ‘six-packed’, shot in elbows, knees and ankles; where houses are daubed with anti-Roma slogans. Brian McGilloway handles these complex issues with a masterful touch, never making them the focus of the novel, rather informing a very good police procedural which can be read and enjoyed as just that. But, if the reader is prepared to dive deeper, the story is so much more rewarding.

‘Bad Blood’ will be published just three weeks before the day of the general election, an election informed by Brexit, an election which will likely lead to further division, perhaps particularly in the only part of the UK with a land border to the Europe we are currently divorcing…

Thanks to Corsair/Hachette and NetGalley for the advance review copy.

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