Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

This meticulously reported book begins with a longstanding mystery: Who abducted Jean McConville, and why? In December 1972, a group of masked men and women dragged McConville, a 38-year-old mother of 10 who had recently been widowed, from her Belfast home. “Say Nothing” investigates what happened to McConville, while also telling the broader story of the Troubles.

“This sensitive and judicious book raises some troubling, and perhaps unanswerable, questions” about how to move forward from an anguished past, our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “Keefe’s narrative is an architectural feat, expertly constructed out of complex and contentious material, arranged and balanced just so.”

Jean McConville was a protestant woman who married a catholic British soldier and lived in the heartland of separatist Belfast.  A mother of ten children, she was widowed in early 1972 - by the end of the year she would be dead.

The Troubles in Ireland were primarily political and nationalistic, fueled by historical events, with an ethnic or sectarian dimension, although it was not a religious conflict. Following the "Bloody Sunday" shootings in Derry in January 1972, the Provisional IRA ramped up their own armed campaign in reaction to the ongoing violence. This culminated in a ferocious bombing campaign in July 1972. The IRA (as well as other Irish republican and loyalist paramilitary groups) had a policy of killing informers within its own ranks; however, from the start of the conflict the term informer was also used for civilians who were suspected of providing information on paramilitary organisations to the security forces. 

Jean McConville

One night, in December 1972, Jean was kidnapped and murdered by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and illicitly buried in County Louth in the Republic of Ireland in 1972 after being accused by the IRA of passing information to British forces (of which there was no actual proof). The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) did not begin to investigate the disappearance properly until 1995, and her body was only discovered by chance in 2003. A formal investigation was launched in 2006 with arrests following in 2014, though suspects would be released due to insufficient evidence.

This crime is notorious due to the fact the Jean was a widowed mother of ten, her body was hidden when the bodies of informers were usually left in public as a warning, and due to the lack of any immediate follow up with regards to finding her.

Keefe said he began researching and writing the book after reading the obituary for Dolours Price in 2013. Dolours was an active member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), and in a series of interviews conducted by Boston College (and for a forthcoming film "I, Dolours), she confessed to her participation in the murder and disappearance of Jean McConville.

read more:
Irish Times - Filming Dolours Price

Irish Times - New Book Reveals Killers

Irish Times - Boston Tapes, Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell
BBC News - Jean McConville, The Disappeared Mother of Ten
The Guardian - Former IRA Chief Cleared Over Killing
The Journal - Son Class For Public Inquiry
Irish Central - Judge Throws Out Case Against Adams

Irish Examiner - Jean McConville

Author: Adrian McKinty

Sean Duffy, a detective sergeant in 1980s Northern Ireland, during the Troubles. He is a Catholic detective in the ranks of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. He has a degree in psychology from Queen's University Belfast, a taste for good literature and music, and lives in the heart of protestant Carrickfergus.  He has very dangerous enemies (including paramilitary commander Bobby Cameron who lives a few doors away) and quite influential friends (hence his secondment by MI5). 

"The beauty of the books is the way McKinty makes use of real events and characters in the scarred history of Northern Ireland as a skeleton for the structure of the books." (source: Sydney Morning Herald)

The Cold Cold Ground

Northern Ireland, spring 1981. Hunger strikes, riots, power cuts, a homophobic serial killer with a penchant for opera, and a young woman's suicide that may yet turn out to be murder: on the surface, the events are unconnected, but then things--and people--aren't always what they seem. Detective Sergeant Duffy is the man tasked with trying to get to the bottom of it all. It's no easy job--especially when it turns out that one of the victims was involved in the IRA but was last seen discussing business with someone from the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force. Add to this the fact that, as a Catholic policeman, it doesn't matter which side he's on, because nobody trusts him, and Sergeant Duffy really is in a no-win situation. Fast-paced, evocative, and brutal, The Cold Cold Ground is a brilliant depiction of Belfast at the height of the Troubles--and of a cop treading a thin, thin line.

I Hear The Sirens In The Street

Sean Duffy knows there's no such thing as a perfect crime. But a torso in a suitcase is pretty close. Still, one tiny clue is all it takes, and there it is. A tattoo. So Duffy, fully fit and back at work after the severe trauma of his last case, is ready to follow the trail of blood-however faint-that always, always connects a body to its killer. A legendarily stubborn man, Duffy becomes obsessed with this mystery as a distraction from the ruins of his love life, and to push down the seed of self-doubt that he seems to have traded for his youthful arrogance. So from country lanes to city streets, Duffy works every angle. And wherever he goes, he smells a rat..

In the Morning I'll Be Gone

A spectacular escape and a man-hunt that could change the future of a nation - and lay one man's past to rest. Sean Duffy's got nothing. And when you've got nothing to lose, you have everything to gain. So when MI5 come knocking, Sean knows exactly what they want, and what he'll want in return, but he hasn't got the first idea how to get it. Of course he's heard about the spectacular escape of IRA man Dermot McCann from Her Majesty's Maze prison. And he knew, with chilly certainty, that their paths would cross. But finding Dermot leads Sean to an old locked room mystery, and into the kind of danger where you can lose as easily as winning. From old betrayals and ancient history to 1984's most infamous crime, Sean tries not to fall behind in the race to annihilation. Can he outrun the most skilled terrorist the IRA ever created? And will the past catch him first?

Gun Street Girl

Belfast, 1985, amidst the “Troubles”: Detective Sean Duffy, a Catholic cop in the Protestant RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary), struggles with burn-out as he investigates a brutal double murder and suicide. Did Michael Kelly really shoot his parents at point blank and then jump off a nearby cliff? A suicide note points to this conclusion, but Duffy suspects even more sinister circumstances. He soon discovers that Kelly was present at a decadent Oxford party where a cabinet minister’s daughter died of a heroin overdose. This may or may not have something to do with Kelly’s subsequent death. New evidence leads elsewhere: gun runners, arms dealers, the British government, and a rogue American agent with a fake identity. Duffy thinks he’s getting somewhere when agents from MI5 show up at his doorstep and try to recruit him, thus taking him off the investigation. Duffy is in it up to his neck, doggedly pursuing a case that may finally prove his undoing.

Rain Dogs

It's just the same things over and again for Sean Duffy: riot duty, heartbreak, cases he can solve but never get to court. But what detective gets two locked-room mysteries in one career? When journalist Lily Bigelow is found dead in the courtyard of Carrickfergus Castle, it looks like a suicide. Yet there are a few things that bother Duffy just enough to keep the case file open, which is how he finds out that Bigelow was working on a devastating investigation of corruption and abuse at the highest levels of power in the UK and beyond.And so Duffy has two impossible problems on his desk: Who killed Lily Bigelow? And what were they trying to hide?

Police At The Station And They Don't Look Friendly

Belfast 1988: A man is found dead, killed with a bolt from a crossbow in front of his house. This is no hunting accident. But uncovering who is responsible for the murder will take Detective Sean Duffy down his most dangerous road yet, a road that leads to a lonely clearing on a high bog where three masked gunmen will force Duffy to dig his own grave. Hunted by forces unknown, threatened by Internal Affairs, and with his relationship on the rocks, Duffy will need all his wits to get out of this investigation in one piece