He wasn't taken in by her motherly approach--Coyne was thinking compensation as he answered her routine questions with the maximum degree of neurosis, presenting an alarming impression of total human wreck. Depression. Irrational fears. Memory loss. Lack of concentration. Post-traumatic stress disorder! By Jesus, Coyne had them all.

There's more going on in Coyne's life. His wife, Carmel, has left him, and some small-time local crooks are trying their best to kill his son, Jimmy. Plus, no longer sworn to uphold the law, Coyne can watch a shoplifter with disinterested appreciation of her technique, then impulsively, and imaginatively, intervene to get her off the hook.

It's a bloody, topsy-turvy world, he realizes, once he learns that she's a Romanian who has paid to be smuggled into Ireland. In the bad old days, before the country's economic miracle, people paid to get out--but nothing's sacred anymore, not even his own teenaged daughters' innocent flesh. Did Pat Coyne ever imagine he'd be the kind of dad who'd be ferrying his girls to get their belly buttons and noses pierced?

A straight line does exist between the Romanian shoplifter and the corpse of poor Tommy Nolan, a harbor bum whose death by drowning Coyne knows wasn't an accident. Hugo Hamilton is in no hurry to draw that line in this sequel to the equally colorful Headbanger. What he prefers to do is prove himself once more a master of constructing sentences you find yourself reading again--even reading aloud--and relishing. --Otto Penzler

As a boy, Hugo Hamilton felt a strong desire "to have no past behind me," to be rid of the confused identity he had inherited from his German mother and Irish father, and to cut the tether that connected him to their collective memory. But listening to stories of his mother's shame at the hands of Allied soldiers in the aftermath of the Second World War, along with his German cousin's mysterious disappearance somewhere on the west coast of Ireland, he felt the strengthening of history's determined grip.

A job at the harbor, rather than offering him respite, entangled him in a bitter feud between two fishermen—one Catholic, one Protestant. Against the background of the spiraling troubles in the North, Hugo listened to the missing persons bulletins going out on the radio for his cousin and watched as the unfolding harbor duel moved toward a tragic end.

The Harbor Boys, deeply moving and well observed, brilliantly charts a young man as he battles inheritance and struggles to place himself in a world of his own making.