Trespass

September 4, 2017
Set largely in the border country between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, Quinn’s uneven fourth mystery featuring Insp. Celcius Daly (after 2015’s Silence) chronicles the embattled Belfast police detective’s struggle to find a missing 10-year-old boy, who has allegedly been abducted by Travellers. Daly quickly finds himself in a politically precarious investigation after he unearths connections between the boy’s disappearance and an decades-old unsolved mystery concerning a missing Traveller woman who was suspected of being an IRA informer during the Troubles. Powered by relentlessly bleak atmospherics and symbolism, this story is darkly immersive on many levels. Quinn’s exploration of the hidden war being waged over the purchase of property on the border is intriguing, as is the secretive culture of the Travellers, a nomadic group who survive by navigating ancient routes through the wilderness. But there’s an emotional numbness to the narrative—particularly in Daly’s characterization—that gives the book a detached and almost indifferent feel that dulls the story’s impact.

September 1, 2017
A kidnapping case in Northern Ireland threatens to unearth long-buried secrets.At the beginning of Quinn's latest inspector Celcius Daly mystery (Silence, 2015, etc.), Samuel Reid, an old farmer, receives a visitor who has new questions about an unsolved murder from the time of the Troubles. A few days later a boy is kidnapped outside a courthouse in bustling modern Belfast. Called upon to investigate the boy's disappearance, Daly starts to suspect that the two cases may be linked. Someone wants to bring the past to light. Someone else wants to keep it hidden. It's a common conflict in the history of Northern Ireland--and in detective novels. At his best, Quinn offers moments of fine, even lyrical writing, as when the details of Daly's old cases are "fixed at a remove" in his mind "like half-submerged buoys in a fog-bound sea." Unfortunately, he is less inventive when it comes to his characters and themes. Celcius Daly is divorced, middle-aged, a loner, haunted by the past, good at his job but "prickly and exasperating" in the estimation of his colleagues and superiors. Readers have met this kind of detective more than once before. And while the idea that past crimes are never really dead and buried certainly has resonance in Belfast, mystery writers from Los Angeles to Tokyo have said much the same thing. This detective novel about the inescapability of history is itself trapped in the past of the genre.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 15, 2017
This is the fourth of the masterfully written Celcius Daly novels (after Silence, 2016). Daly is a Catholic detective inspector in Northern Ireland. While investigating a boy's disappearance, he uncovers ties to the era of the Troubles and the disappearance of Mary O'Sullivan, a young traveler (or gypsy), and her baby in the border country, reportedly at the hands of a violent paramilitary group. He digs deeply into an organized-crime syndicate within the O'Sullivan gypsy clan. Their secret must be chopped out of the frozen sea of secrets at the heart of the nation's painful history. Northern Ireland, Quinn suggests, is a country in which many are still held hostage by the ghosts of the past. In the remarkable opening sequence, a dreaming man dances torturously through a Dante-like inferno, while Daly waltzes alone in a purgatory all his own. A decent man and a dedicated law officer, he is considering moving on, but he, too, remains unable to break free from disturbing memories of his family's history and their land. His personal troubles, unsettling details about his fellow officers and the victim's family, and an enlightening look at the travelers and their wandering ways unfold in carefully wrought, often lyrical prose, always rich with foreboding. The ending is somewhat surprising and totally satisfying. Fans of Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville, in particular as well as all readers who relish that Celtic edge, will not want to miss this one.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)