GoodReads meta-data is 362 pages, rated 4.1 by 2252 litizens.
Genre: Krimi
Verdict: Craic!
Slacker Paul ekes out a living in contemporary Dublin by doing six-hours of charity work a week. As long as he does this work a stipend from his late, fabulously wealthy aunt, who despised him, gives him a bare living. He was her only living relative. Her idea was that this stipend would get him started, at long last, on earning a living. She over-estimated her man, because his idea is to scrape along on that stipend. As a consumer he has learned how to make that stipend stretch to cover his very few needs. No bargain bin in Dublin escapes his notice. Most Op Shops are too upmarket for him.
Most of the gratis charity work is visiting inmates and patients at hospices and retirement (old folks) homes in and around Dublin. He has shopped around and found the best set-up, taking into account transport cost to and from, level of demands from clients, opportunities with female staff, and such. Paul is none too bright despite all his scheming. The staff at the institutions verify his work and he lets the elderly clients talk to him and he pretends to be whomever they say. He takes the chits to the lawyer managing the trust fund and gets the Euros. Simple. Too. To last.
Those patients that are assigned to him have no other visitors and are pretty confused about who any one is or where they are. He has one of those non-nondescript faces that they can project onto and he is a good listener.
Then one night, as he listens to a new client rattle on, the dying old man, Mr Brown, riddled with cancer beckons him closer to whisper weakly in his ear, or so he thinks. He moves the chair and leans forward and the old coot stabs Paul in the shoulder with a scissor blade he had secreted in the bed. What with all the tubes and wires on the old cuss the two of them get tangled and fall to the floor, killing the patient who was eighty if a day, and leaving Paul bleeding from the stab wound with additional bumps and bruises.
A routine police investigation soon discovers that the cancer-ridden client was not Mr Brown but rather Moriarty long since thought deceased in Montevideo. Whoa! Where has he been these last thirty years and what has he been doing? Who did he think Paul was that he wanted to stab him? None of this interests Paul, until….
It get worse when Paul barely escapes another much younger villain. His car is booby trapped. He is on the run! He blames the nurse who sent him to listen to Moriarty and she feels guilty enough to club together with him, because it seems someone is trying to kill her, too. Indeed anyone is a target who had anything to do with Moriarty at the hospice.
The pace is fast and furious. The throw-away lines are many. The Irish idioms are delightful. Much ground is covered in and around Dublin. Little is as it seems: The beautiful TV journalist is rancid. The upright police commissioner isn’t. The shifty cabinet minister is honest. The objectionable husband (never mind the details) is a wounded lion. The helpless shut-in is far from helpless. Even the dead are not what they seem.
Hurling figures in the story, as does Guiness so we know it is Irish.
The characters who pass in review include Bunny, the hurling coach who never bluffs, Dorothy who lied about the gun collection of her late husband, Detective Inspector Stewart who may be the last and only honest Gardià in All Ireland, pregnant lawyer Nora whose taser is illegal and all the more welcome for it, but nary a priest though the pews were near full.
Glad I read it on Kindle since I could look up the Irishisms as I went. It is the first of series of four or five titles by Caimh McDonnell.
I started the next one a few hours after finishing this one, and finished them all since I drafted this post. Craic!
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