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Inspector Matt Minogue #6
A Carra King
The troubled son of an Irish-American tycoon is found dead in the trunk of a car at Dublin Airport.
A rookie security guard at Dublin airport spots a pool of dried blood under a car: the search for a missing tourist is over. The American lies bludgeoned to death in the trunk of his rented car. Minogue soon learns that there’s more at stake here than the murder of a visitor, more than adverse publicity for Ireland’s vital tourist industry: Patrick (Leyne) Shaughnessy, the dead man, is scion of an Irish-American multimillionaire and food tycoon, John Leyne.
From the obscure lodgings in remote towns and villages, a confusing account of Shaughnessy’s itinerary and interests trickles in. The investigation traces him to historical sites that he visited with an unknown woman companion, but is eventually stumped by Shaughnessy’s disappearance after a sighting near the west coast. Meanwhile, background information from the U.S. reveals him as a man with a troubled past: divorced, alcoholic, and estranged from his father.
His female companion maybe be Aoife Hartnett, an archaeologist from Dublin’s National Museum. She cannot be found. As odd and idiosyncratic a pattern as Shaughnessy’s journeys seem to have been, Minogue is soon able to discern some method to them: they match sites where Aoife Hartnett worked. Two of those sites have had antiquities stolen from them over the past five years.
While the investigation broadens, Minogue continues to be fed information about Shaughnessy’s past. John Leyne, he discovers, is a very influential patron of many Irish American causes. One of Leyne’s passions in recent years has been the collection of antiquities. With Minogue trying to piece together these baffling shards of information into a mosaic which will map his way to Patrick Shaughnessy’s killer, a body is discovered in shallow grave not far from the site of the theft.
A Faustian bargain was struck: payment is due, now. Venturing into his ancestral homeland, to propitiate his estranged father brought him not the glory he hoped, but a brutal end.
A rookie security guard at Dublin airport spots a pool of dried blood under a car: the search for a missing tourist is over. The American lies bludgeoned to death in the trunk of his rented car. Minogue soon learns that there’s more at stake here than the murder of a visitor, more than adverse publicity for Ireland’s vital tourist industry: Patrick (Leyne) Shaughnessy, the dead man, is scion of an Irish-American multimillionaire and food tycoon, John Leyne.
From the obscure lodgings in remote towns and villages, a confusing account of Shaughnessy’s itinerary and interests trickles in. The investigation traces him to historical sites that he visited with an unknown woman companion, but is eventually stumped by Shaughnessy’s disappearance after a sighting near the west coast. Meanwhile, background information from the U.S. reveals him as a man with a troubled past: divorced, alcoholic, and estranged from his father.
His female companion maybe be Aoife Hartnett, an archaeologist from Dublin’s National Museum. She cannot be found. As odd and idiosyncratic a pattern as Shaughnessy’s journeys seem to have been, Minogue is soon able to discern some method to them: they match sites where Aoife Hartnett worked. Two of those sites have had antiquities stolen from them over the past five years.
While the investigation broadens, Minogue continues to be fed information about Shaughnessy’s past. John Leyne, he discovers, is a very influential patron of many Irish American causes. One of Leyne’s passions in recent years has been the collection of antiquities. With Minogue trying to piece together these baffling shards of information into a mosaic which will map his way to Patrick Shaughnessy’s killer, a body is discovered in shallow grave not far from the site of the theft.
A Faustian bargain was struck: payment is due, now. Venturing into his ancestral homeland, to propitiate his estranged father brought him not the glory he hoped, but a brutal end.
548 pages, Paperback
First published September 28, 2000
About the author
John Brady
46 books16 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
John Brady was born in Dublin, the fictional setting of his acclaimed series of Matt Minogue mystery novels. Brady immigrated to Canada at the age of 20, and has worked as a bank official, RCMP clerical officer and teacher. His seventh Minogue novel, Wonderland, taps into Dublin’s exploding economy and its aftershocks at every level of society. He lives in Toronto. He won the Arthur Ellis Award to the First Best Novel in 1989 for A Stone of the Heart.
Series:
* Inspector Matt Minogue
John Brady was born in Dublin, the fictional setting of his acclaimed series of Matt Minogue mystery novels. Brady immigrated to Canada at the age of 20, and has worked as a bank official, RCMP clerical officer and teacher. His seventh Minogue novel, Wonderland, taps into Dublin’s exploding economy and its aftershocks at every level of society. He lives in Toronto. He won the Arthur Ellis Award to the First Best Novel in 1989 for A Stone of the Heart.
Series:
* Inspector Matt Minogue
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 16, 2016
John Brady's ten Matt Minogue procedurals are really good books, marked by an interesting main character, glimpses into the nature of Irish society, and tight and accurate procedural elements. Brady migrated to Canada from County Clare when he was in his twenties, but his books are rooted in Ireland. (I started this book when my wife and I were in Ireland in October and would have finished it sooner but for misplacing it. Finding it makes me want to reread "Kaddish in Dublin" as well as the four books that I haven't read. Brady's books are easy enough to find in Canada and Ireland, but the last four or five have been hard to find in the US without resorting to Amazon or its satellites. I'd rather find one in a used book store.)
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February 24, 2023Honestly, I found it very difficult to get into this book.
May 26, 2012
4 & 1/2 stars. Brady just keeps getting better and better. the voice of his fourth policeman, inspector Matt Minogue of the Garda, even in the third person, is here pretty much part of his stream of consciousness, and he's thinking as much about his own family, and the people he works with and for, and the state of the land he walks, as he is about the case at hand.
his famously difficult artist daughter Iseult, now heavily pregnant, is publicly showing an artwork depicting The Holy Family wrapped in barbed wire, and Minogue keeps glancing off just what she's delivering with that message. in county Mayo there's a dig called Carra Fields that might be two millennia older than the first pyramids. meanwhile there's endless banter about the accents and common features of all the provinces and counties. and there are endlessly droll exchanges with his colleagues, on art and politics and heritage, mostly delivered in deadpan rounds so pointed that Flann O'Brien would have been pleased to have written them, and Minogue seems to live in his territory anyhow, right down to the cruiskeen lawn.
the writing is so lyrical, you can hear the lilt of all those country accents colliding, declaiming, harmonies rising, until the flatter tones of the North American speakers only seem to define the differences in method and tone and thinking as they're read by a country of poets. who may or may not be so much lost as displaced in time from a possibly-mythical peaceful kingdom that came before all the patriarchal heroes, here represented as the lands and family of a prehistoric Carra king.
which may be the country of Minogue's dreams, but not so much the one he's got. but anyhow Minogue thinks of this less as science than as grafted story: the tendency of the Irish to reinvent themselves at every turn. but whose turn is this? and in his own story, he has difficulty finding his road, or claiming a rightaway; the case develops as a set of roadblocks to knock down. in spite of politics, flu, a pretty comprehensive coverup, and all these killer asides that try to divert him from the subject at hand, Minogue pursues his case single-mindedly, shot at and lied to and sat on until he finally loses his temper, continuing till the whole affair at last comes clear.
so in the tradition of the Carra king, and like another ancient king he knows called Sisyphus, Minogue too finds himself taking the measure of heavy stones with an eye to rolling them up to the crown of the hill, asserting his sovereign claim to deal, only to find the weight of them rolling back down on him again. Minogue the king of nothing much in a more dangerous and confusing time, bogged down and isolated, rules as he must both in and out of time on landscape, family, survival, and justice.
his famously difficult artist daughter Iseult, now heavily pregnant, is publicly showing an artwork depicting The Holy Family wrapped in barbed wire, and Minogue keeps glancing off just what she's delivering with that message. in county Mayo there's a dig called Carra Fields that might be two millennia older than the first pyramids. meanwhile there's endless banter about the accents and common features of all the provinces and counties. and there are endlessly droll exchanges with his colleagues, on art and politics and heritage, mostly delivered in deadpan rounds so pointed that Flann O'Brien would have been pleased to have written them, and Minogue seems to live in his territory anyhow, right down to the cruiskeen lawn.
the writing is so lyrical, you can hear the lilt of all those country accents colliding, declaiming, harmonies rising, until the flatter tones of the North American speakers only seem to define the differences in method and tone and thinking as they're read by a country of poets. who may or may not be so much lost as displaced in time from a possibly-mythical peaceful kingdom that came before all the patriarchal heroes, here represented as the lands and family of a prehistoric Carra king.
which may be the country of Minogue's dreams, but not so much the one he's got. but anyhow Minogue thinks of this less as science than as grafted story: the tendency of the Irish to reinvent themselves at every turn. but whose turn is this? and in his own story, he has difficulty finding his road, or claiming a rightaway; the case develops as a set of roadblocks to knock down. in spite of politics, flu, a pretty comprehensive coverup, and all these killer asides that try to divert him from the subject at hand, Minogue pursues his case single-mindedly, shot at and lied to and sat on until he finally loses his temper, continuing till the whole affair at last comes clear.
so in the tradition of the Carra king, and like another ancient king he knows called Sisyphus, Minogue too finds himself taking the measure of heavy stones with an eye to rolling them up to the crown of the hill, asserting his sovereign claim to deal, only to find the weight of them rolling back down on him again. Minogue the king of nothing much in a more dangerous and confusing time, bogged down and isolated, rules as he must both in and out of time on landscape, family, survival, and justice.
September 10, 2010
DNF. Slow to start, going nowhere fast.
December 20, 2014
This was recommend by Rupen. The author is husband of one of his colleagues.
December 29, 2014
those irish are talkers. If you like dialogue then this is your book.
February 6, 2015
Pretty good. Devious plot and characters.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews