cover image Dublin Dead

Dublin Dead

Gerard O’Donovan. Scribner, $25 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4516-1063-5

In Irish author O’Donovan’s excellent follow-up to 2011’s The Priest, Det. Insp. Mike Mulcahy, the head of the Garda Síochána’s drug squad’s small International Liaison Unit in Dublin Castle, takes on a complex big-time cocaine smuggling case. Mulcahy’s under pressure to produce results or his team may be disbanded, and his love interest, reporter Siobhan Fallon, barely recovered physically and emotionally from the injuries she suffered in The Priest, has an ambitious junior reporter slavering at her heels, hungry for her job. Siobhan relentlessly tracks the red-hot story she needs, the disappearance of Cork accountant Gemma Kearney. The alternating narratives of her search for Kearney and Mulcahy’s investigations into grisly drug-related homicides first parallel, then converge into a brutal shoot-’em-up climax. O’Donovan pulls out some surprising stops to produce a tech-savvy, raw-edgy police-cum-press procedural with more twists than an Irish tall tale and enough intriguing loose ends to leave readers eager for the sequel. Agent: Jonathon Lyons, Lyons Literary. (Mar.)