teems with moral dilemmas, and Dublin emerges as a city of ambiguity: a newly-scrubbed face hiding a criminal culture of terrible variety. Small-time criminals have become millionaire businessmen, the poor are still struggling to survive, and the police face a world where the old rules no longer apply. “Believe me, you want with you on holiday,” says the . “This is the kind of book you pass on to someone you like, and say ‘read this.’” “The author does everything well. He conveys beautifully the ritual of cops and their quarry, while evoking the feel of a city where new yuppie influence rubs up against the remnants of a seedy, savage past.”— “The lethal precision of his closing punches leaves quite a lasting mark.”— “It’s Kerrigan’s firm control of the procedural genre and the breathtaking twist he gives his plot that show him to be a master of the form.”— “An absorbing, beautifully written tale.”— (London) “Kerrigan’s moody, unsettling tale explores the criminal underside of Dublin and, by extension, the dark, hidden face of twenty-first-century Ireland . . . Gripping crime fiction in which the setting is unequivocally the protagonist.”— “Good news for readers who can appreciate the moral complexities of this flawed hero.”— “An intricately plotted novel that can safely be mentioned in the same breath as those by Rankin.”— (starred review)