[close] "A Good Salesman can sell anything." So says the protagonist of Joseph O'Connor's remarkable third novel, who is selling nothing less than a justification to commit murder. A divorced, middle-aged recovering alcoholic, Billy Sweeney is in a world of trouble. His beloved younger daughter was brutally beaten during an attempted robbery and now lies comatose in a Dublin hospital; worse, Donal Quinn, the ringleader of the gang who put her there, has escaped from prison before his trial, and the police can't find him. Then one day, Sweeney spots a disguised Quinn in an electronics store. He considers calling the police--even goes so far as dialing the number--before "a thought occurred to me, as clear as the moment when a migraine lifts." The bereaved salesman decides to take justice into his own hands. What follows is a clever, at times terrifying game of cat and mouse as Sweeney first stalks Quinn and then catches him--with wildly unexpected results.

Though The Salesman has elements of a noir-ish thriller, it is, first and foremost, an examination of love. Written in the form of a journal from Sweeney to his comatose daughter, the book leapfrogs back and forth in time, chronicling Sweeney's courtship and troubled marriage to Grace Lawrence, his alcoholism, and his eventual divorce--even as it describes his hunt for Quinn. The love between friends, between a man and a woman, and between a father and a child are all poignantly limned here; what sets The Salesman apart, however, is the relationship that develops between Sweeney and his nemesis. O'Connor has written a novel that brims with emotion while avoiding sentimentality. Moving, disturbing, at times grimly humorous, this is Irish fiction at its best. --Alix Wilber

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