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The Belfast Novels
by Stuart Neville
Book Reviewed by:An apparent suicide exposes a deadly secret in the suburbs of Belfast.
Henry Garrick, a local car dealer who was maimed in an accident five months before, has apparently taken his own life. A simple case, it should be wrapped up in a few days. But something doesn't feel right to Belfast detective Serena Flanagan, despite the fact that there is no evidence of foul play.
As she investigates, Flanagan interviews Roberta Garrick, Henry's widow, who is comforted in her grief by Reverend Peter McKay, rector of the local church and a close family friend. Flanagan is carrying heavy personal burdens, her mind and marriage nearly at breaking point, and on impulse she confides in the rector, seeking his spiritual help. But with the secrets McKay is keeping, he is in no position to help anyone. His faith long gone, he is lost in a spiral of lust and guilt from which he sees no escape. Until, that is, the policewoman offers him a glimpse of salvation.
Flanagan ignores her superiors' advice to close the case, call it a suicide, and be done with it. As she picks at the threads of the dead man's life, a disturbing picture emerges, and she realizes the widow Roberta Garrick is not what she seems ...
I can't just live for the other world. I need to live in this one now.
So say the fallen. So they've said since time began."
1
Detective Chief Inspector Serena Flanagan focused on the box of tissues that sat on the coffee table between her and Dr. Brady. A leaf of soft paper bursting up and out, ready for her tears. Just like when she'd been diagnosed with cancer. A box like this one had sat close to hand on the desk. She didn't need one then, and she didn't need one now.
Dr. Brady had no interest in abnormal cells, growths, tumours. Flanagan's mind was his concern. He sat cross-legged in the chair on the other side of the table, chewing the end of a biro. It clicked and scratched against his teeth, a persistent noise that triggered memories of exam halls and waiting rooms, and made Flanagan dig at her palms with her nails.
The counsellor pursed his lips and inhaled through his nose in a way that Flanagan found even more ...
As with most noir, So Say the Fallen is a novel about the monsters that roam among us, unseen until they strike; it’s about greed, lust, and manipulation. It’s also about a sense of duty that sometimes costs too much personally. But Neville, like other sophisticated crime writers – think James Lee Burke or Dennis Lehane – isn’t afraid of exploring themes beyond Thou shalt not shoot nor stab nor poison nor drown...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Gary Presley).
In So Say the Fallen, it is murder most foul in Belfast. Northern Ireland's capital city is as much a character in Neville's work as it is a place in the novel. It's where the author lives and, has been the home of a number of famous people; it is the birthplace of the Christian author and philosopher C. S. Lewis; John Wood Dunlop invented the pneumatic tire in Belfast, and James Murray invented Milk of Magnesia there. The sixth president of Israel, Chaim Herzog, was born in north Belfast in 1918 (Herzog's father was a rabbi of the Annesley Street Synagogue). And, of course, the Titanic was constructed in Belfast at the Harland and Wolfe Shipyard between 1909 and 1911 - where the same company now maintains the world's largest dry-dock....
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