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Bartholomew Gill is celebrated for his unsentimental vision of crime on the Dublin streets, and also for his nuanced descriptions of character and Irish places. While
The Death of an Irish Tinker is one of the more gruesome installments in the wonderful Peter McGarr mystery series, it is also one of the most powerful in its exploration of the sociopath and drug kingpin known as the Toddler.
The story is revealed by a series of scenes framed in both the present and the past world of the novel. First, Gill shows the making of a killer as he traces the tortured young life of Desmond Bacon, a.k.a. the Toddler. Cutting ahead several years, Chief Superintendent McGarr discovers a dried, nearly mummified corpse high an enormous sequoia on the estate of Eithne Carruthers. Moving back in time again, the reader watches a horrid night in the life of tinker Biddy Nevins. Biddy is a street artist who perfectly reproduces pages from the Book of Kells on the Dublin sidewalks. But on this night her gifted memory becomes a curse; she witnesses the Toddler and his "shades" crush a man's skull under a bus. Before she can fully process what she's seen, she becomes the target of the elusive drug lord who wants to wipe away all evidence of his crime. Biddy flees Dublin, leaving behind her husband and child and the settled life she had begun to craft for herself. But when Biddy's mother shows up in McGarr's office with her scattered version of Biddy's final night in the city, the detective and the young "Rut'ie" Bresnahan begin to weave a trap for the Toddler that leads to a bloody climax.
Gill is a gifted writer who manages to bring a keen understanding of Irish culture to a classic police procedural. Readers are sure to relish the prose and the Irish dialect alongside the chilling tale of a brutal killer. Some other McGarr mysteries include Death of an Irish Sea Wolf, Death of an Ardent Bibliophile, and Death of a Joyce Scholar. --Patrick O'Kelley
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
When the chronology's all sorted out, it looks like this. First, Desmond Bacon, a.k.a. the Toddler, Ireland's premier druglord, stands by and watches as his Bookends, the Hyde brothers, shove Gavin O'Reilly under the wheels of a Dublin bus. (There's talk that Toddler's already plumped up his formidable murder tally by defenestrating traveling musician Paddy McDonagh, but no more of that.) The murder's witnessed by Biddy Nevins, the illiterate, artistically gifted Queen of the Buskers, who hies her family away from Toddler's goons, but not fast enough. Six months later, Eithne Carruthers returns from a vacation to find the skeleton of Mickalou Maugham, Biddy's King, naked and chained to the upper limbs of a soaring old tree on her estate. The next person to die is Toddler's driver Archie Carruthers, who made the arrangements for Mickalou's final resting place. Then the Bookends are killed: one, two, so. And when Chief Supt. Peter McGarr (The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf, 1996, etc.) leans on Cornelius Duggan, Toddler's bent solicitor, to roll over on his boss, Duggan vanishes like smoke. With so many loose ends neatly snipped off, how do you like Biddy Nevins's chances of survival when the tale fades back in after 12 miraculously uneventful years? Considering the elevated body count, Toddler never does seem all that threatening. Maybe it's feisty Biddy, who arms herself more heavily than any clay pigeon; maybe it's the lilt in his language, which makes music of every fatality. --
Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
