THE GLASGOW HERALD called McKinty “the best of the new generation of Irish crime novelists.”

McKinty is the author of seven crime novels, including DEAD I WELL MAY BE, which was short listed for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award, FIFTY GRAND, the 2010 Spinetingler Award winner, and FALLING GLASS. I shall definitely read all his other works, although McKinty, himself, suggested the order for me, based on those he felt had achieved what he set out to do. When I caught up with Adrian, he was just setting off with his family to see the penguins for four days that gave me the chance to read his two remarkable books in The Troubles series. Educated at Oxford (Philosophy degree), he emigrated to Harlem where he worked at the Columbia Medical School as a librarian, taught English in Denver, and then relocated his family to Australia and St. Set against the backdrop of Northern Ireland’s most tumultuous of times, readers are taken back to the eighties, when John DeLorean was going to bring Northern Ireland’s economy back by establishing his futuristic auto company in that troubled land.Īdrian was born three miles north of Belfast in 1968 in Carrickfergus, the setting for this second novel in the series. Duffy is bound and determined to pursue the case, no matter what. In time, Duffy turns up at the doorstep of a beautiful, flame-haired, twenty-something widow, whose husband died at the hands of an IRA assassination team just a few months prior. The torso turns out to be all that’s left of an American tourist who once served in the U.S. Sean Duffy, crime-fighting policeman, finds a torso in a suitcase. I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET was published by Prometheus Books in May of 2013.

Sean Duffy (a “peeler,” or policeman, in the slang McKinty uses with such familiarity) has once again intrigued us in the second novel, with the convoluted plot of I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET, the first book’s follow-up. The first book in The Troubles series, THE COLD, COLD GROUND was expertly done. Praise such as “McKinty is a big new talent” (THE DAILY TELEGRAPH) and “McKinty’s literate expertly crafted crime novel confirms his place as one of his generation’s leading talents” (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY) make it clear that readers are in for a treat when they select a McKinty novel.

I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET is the second book in that series, and Ian Rankin, author of the Inspector Rebus novels, said, “I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET blew my bloody doors off!” McKinty blurs the line between genre writing and literary fiction with his thriller mystery series about The Troubles in Northern Ireland.

The cold cold ground by adrian mckinty