Bibliophile: In the Morning I’ll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty

In the Morning I’ll Be Gone

by Adrian McKinty

Allen & Unwin

Sean Duffy always looked up to classmate Dermot McCann. Both were highly intelligent and a bit wild but Dermot was the head boy while Sean was the deputy. Sean went to university and became a detective and the charismatic Dermot became a skilled IRA terrorist and ended up in prison.

This is the third in the Sean Duffy series about the 1983 escape from Belfast’s Maze Prison by major players in the IRA, with the previous two adventures – The Cold Cold Ground and I Hear Sirens in the Street – having both won awards. Dermot has escaped from the Maze and Sean is recruited to hunt him down before he uses his bomb-making skills.

Sean takes the reader into the Troubles and the derelict neighbourhoods, looking for leads to locate his valuable quarry. Specialising in biting wit and sarcasm, he doesn’t always follow the rule book and eventually he is promised information if he can solve a murder.

The who-done-it suspense builds as Sean seems to go in circles, struggling to solve the mystery of the locked room and the tension becomes almost unbearable as the likelihood of explosive attacks increases with time.

Although he now lives in Melbourne, Adrian McKinty grew up in Northern Ireland and he paints a complex the backdrop of the political and social upheaval in Ireland during this time to the suspenseful drama.

Lezly Herbert