Nothing gives me greater reading pleasure than to discover a new author who has me reaching for their next book even before I’ve finished the first. Northern Ireland-born and former Australian resident Adrian McKinty is one such writer. In particular, I found his “Inspector Sean Duffy” series both gripping and amusing in a way only the Irish can make us laugh, often in the same sentence.
With such tantalising titles as ‘I Hear the Sirens in the Street’ and ‘Police at the Station and They Don’t look Friendly’, it’s just the start of a comforting relationship as we follow Inspector Duffy, the only Catholic policeman in a predominantly protestant station in Belfast during the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Island in the ‘70s. (Every trip requires him to look under his car for bombs).
While it’s no spoiler to say that he always gets the baddie(s) in the end, (they always do), it’s his methods and musing throughout the books that get you in right from the start. A little background study about McKinty’s road to success had him working as an Uber driver, a rugby coach, a security guard and a bookstore clerk, which provide him with a collection of quirky personalities to infuse into a range of secondary characters who are clearly based on his real-life experiences.
The are nine books in the Sean Duffy series, and while they don’t need to be read in order, if you like the first one, ‘The Cold, Cold Ground’, then it might be worth reading the others in sequence.
(A word of caution: I tried to move away from the Duffy series to read his award-winning novel ‘The Chain’ and found it too confronting in its theme and content to finish – be warned.)