Synopsis: Dublin, 2019: Michael Gleeson is a well-respected psychiatrist – a quiet man, a good friend, and a useless cook. He also spends part of his professional life secretly counseling former members of the disbanded IRA. Michael always thought this would be enough to satisfy his Republican heritage, but when the highly skilled yet deeply disturbed Turlough O’Sullivan enters his office, Michael sees an opportunity that he just can't overlook.
Haunted by childhood tales of the gruesome history of the Irish people under British rule, Michael enlists his new patient's help in tracking down and killing the living descendants of the worst men in Ireland's past, figures whose names still send a shiver down the spine.
But Michael's plan for a bloody revenge doesn't run smoothly: Not only must he learn the brutal truth about the role models who formed him as a child, but on his trail is a young Irish detective temporarily assigned to Scotland Yard, an officer who becomes obsessed with stopping the unknown serial killer who is out for an historical revenge that she can't understand.
How many of us have asked ourselves "would that I could right an historical wrong" - and how many of us, had we the opportunity to do so, would?
This is the premise of Finkielman's psychological thriller set in Ireland wherein Michael Gleeson, noted psychiatrist and Irish Republican sympathiser, does just that. From the stories religiously instilled in him as a young and malleable child of The Troubles by his relatives, Michael Gleeson becomes fixated on events dating back to County Mayo during the Irish Famine, but has done nothing to assuage this unrequited need for revenge until the day when the instrument of his vengeance walks through the door.
The Great Famine and its effects have been felt keenly by many down the ages by the Irish diaspora. This was a tragic period of mass starvation and disease from 1845 to 1849, with the most severely affected areas in the west and south of Ireland. In the period between 1841 and 1851, the population of County Mayo declined by 29 per cent from 388,887 to 247,830. Deaths and emigration accounted for the loss of 114,057 of Mayo's population - a stark figure when compared to the county's population of 130,507 (2016 Census).
It is said that " ... the Irish aren't a people for forgetting about the past ... " and it is a cry from the past that ignites Gleeson's obsession with events linked to the Famine and finally propels him to move forward and seek retribution of the victims ... "... let it be some man down the years who will take the sharpest hands ..." .
This is an engrossing tale - and I was drawn to it due to this being a part of my own family history. It did, however, start out a little patchy in places, but I put this down to the storyline - and the characters - finding its feet, so to speak. The story is related through various mediums - we have the first person narrative of Michael Gleeson - who is both likeable and detestable - in the present as well as taking us back to his childhood; we have the historical narrative in the form of letters from Honoria O'Gliasain, reliving her experiences in Mayo at the time of the Famine; we have the narrative of police officer Maggie Foster, seconded to Scotland Yard, who finally puts the pieces of the puzzle together; and we have the instrument of death. There are various smaller contributing narratives, each added another layer and perspective, and linking in the various themes in order to bring the overall narrative together.
The history and politics of Ireland is never clear cut, especially to an outsider. Like the country itself, this tale is a contradiction wherein villains are heroes and heroes are villains, and the truth is shrouded in a fog layered over the ages, obscuring, obfuscating, complex and dense; and where one man is held captive by his own obsessive compulsion to right a historical wrong.
A very suspenseful and engaging first novel.
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