If you wanted to murder a lot of people, you joined the paramilitaries and used that as a cover for your sociopathic tendencies.ĭuffy is also drawn to the case of a missing girl, Lucy Moore. Northern Ireland was not the soil in which serial killers grew. There had never been a gay serial killer. But Duffy is not entirely convinced that these crimes are sectarian in nature. In Northern Ireland, if you want to kill people, you just have to join a paramilitary organisation – there are plenty of outlets for sadistic violent behaviour if that is your thing. His colleagues don’t understand his reasoning. Not everybody in Ulster was … crazy, but this was Northern Ireland in 1981 which was slightly less conservative than, say, Salem in 1692

When two homosexual men are killed, Duffy fears that a homophobic serial killer is on the loose despite feeling that the idea itself is ‘too gothic for Ulster’. He fits with neither side of the conflict, not fully accepted by either community, but this remove allows him to watch from the sidelines and question what others might take for granted. He is a Catholic police officer in the predominantly Protestant RUC, who also happens to live in the predominantly Protestant town of Carrickfergus, outside Belfast. It’s an evocative period, with the news full of the Republican hunger strikes at the Maze prison, the Yorkshire Ripper running rampant in England and the biggest Royal Wedding – that of Charles and Diana –taking over the public imagination.ĭetective Sean Duffy is an anomaly. The story is set in 1981 in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. Thankfully though, the book itself did not disappoint. Fast-paced, evocative, and brutal, The Cold Cold Ground is a brilliant depiction of Belfast at the height of the Troubles-and of a cop treading a thin, thin line.As a massive Tom Waits fan, I’m a sucker for a book that uses his lyrics as an epigraph so The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty won me over before I even started reading. Add to this the fact that, as a Catholic policeman, it doesn't matter which side he's on, because nobody trusts him, and Sergeant Duffy really is in a no-win situation.

It's no easy job-especially when it turns out that one of the victims was involved in the IRA but was last seen discussing business with someone from the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force. Detective Sergeant Duffy is the man tasked with trying to get to the bottom of it all. Hunger strikes, riots, power cuts, a homophobic serial killer with a penchant for opera, and a young woman's suicide that may yet turn out to be murder: on the surface, the events are unconnected, but then things-and people-aren't always what they seem. McKinty's previous book, Falling Glass, was an Best Thriller of 2011 Northern Ireland, spring 1981.

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The cold cold ground book