Border Angels

August 11, 2014
The degradation of human trafficking is at the heart of Quinn's somber second novel featuring Northern Ireland's Insp. Celcius Daly (after 2012's Disappeared). Daly is called in after a badly burnt corpse is found in a car, the victim believed to be a Croatian pimp running a local brothel. The reader already knows that the death of the man, Sergei Kriich, was an accident, but the inspector soon has a genuine mystery to unravel. Jack Fowler, an affluent property developer with a weapon-dealing past, has been found floating in his swimming pool, with preliminary indications that he suffered a blow to the head before entering the water. Fowler's business dealings attracted the attention of the Fraud Squad, and he's also suspected of having swindled millions from the Northern Ireland peace fund by a shadowy figure who survived a hunger strike during the Troubles. The mystery of Fowler's death is compelling, but Quinn's most intriguing investigation concerns his examination of the toll taken on women forced into prostitution. Agent: Paul Feldstein, Feldstein Agency.

October 1, 2013
A runaway prostitute fights to stay a few steps ahead of a brooding detective and a crime lord in Northern Ireland. Chief Inspector Celcius Daly needs to be a knight in shining armor after the car accident that paralyzed his wife and ended his marriage. When he discovers that the same need brought Jack Fowler, a real estate developer and former IRA gunrunner, to a watery end, Daly must determine if his death was suicide. Fowler had been misusing funds meant to regenerate communities in South Amargh, on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and his bubble was about to pop. Before he died, however, he set up an account for Lena Novak, the mistress he rescued from a border brothel. Jozef Mikolajek, the owner of the brothel and the women in it, is as determined as Daly to find Lena. A former cellmate of Fowler's is also in pursuit. In Lena's determination to get home to Croatia, she leads the three men in a direction none of them could have foreseen and at least one of them regrets. Daly's descent into the black-market operations and empty housing developments of the border country gives the reader little hope but much sympathy for the two main characters. Quinn (Disappeared, 2012) can't be accused of sentimentality in his portrait of contemporary Northern Ireland, the tough detective who grew up there and the even tougher woman brought there against her will.

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