Inheritance: Amazon.ca: Keith Baker, Stephen Armstrong: Books

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BBC journalist Keith Baker mines his longtime Northern Ireland beat to create a saga of personal and political revenge. Inheritance, his first foray into fiction, opens with a murder so brutal it effectively brings to an end decades of terrorism and guerrilla warfare between the IRA and British government forces. The year is 1997. The victim is an IRA bigwig. We readers are the only witnesses to the crime, and even though we don't know whodunit, or why, we do know something is amiss. Twenty years later--the novel's "real time"--the female chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, recalls it this way: "'There were all sorts of allegations about Miller's death, claims from one side or another about double-dealing and conspiracy. In the end, no one knew what to believe, other than that someone was stirring the shit in a big way. Some people even claimed the whole thing, from start to finish, was part of some sort of bizarre MI5 plot. And I must confess I wondered about that myself. Had the dirty tricks department been mixed up in it all somehow? I don't think we'll ever know."

Jack McCallan wants to know. He's at loose ends careerwise, recently recovered from combat wounds that let him retire from the army as a hero. He takes a beautiful married woman as his mistress and a makeshift job as gamesmaster at a spa for stressed-out executives. Then his father, Bill, put out to pasture from a high command post in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, is fried when his mobile home explodes, an accident that the new, improved Police Service attributes to alcohol-induced carelessness. As he settles his father's affairs and takes possession of the small fortune bequeathed him, Jack stumbles on bits of evidence that suggest Bill was keeping a guilty secret that may have led to his death. Jack resolves to follow the trail as it branches, leading both to present danger and betrayals concealed in the past.

Baker's plot twists and turns nicely, galloping along at a pace brisk enough to sweep up most any reader eager to be thrilled: heroes are revealed as villains, illusions as realities, allies are shown to be betrayers as the novel's stack of corpses mounts. A sense of Northern Ireland's war weariness and lingering paranoia hangs like ground fog over the 20-years-hence peace and prosperity that the author first posits, then threatens. His characters are mostly credible, and the scenario whereby political expediency and personal greed collaborate to create an economically desirable cease-fire is ingenious. Baker's political imagination outstrips his ability, or willingness, to create a technologically, socially, and intellectually believable future, though, leaving the reader feeling occasionally unmoored. --Joyce Thompson --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

BBC journalist Baker's strong debut thriller, set two decades in the future, suggests how difficult it will be to bury the legacy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The best characters in Inheritance, like the protagonist Jack McCallan, lack almost all conviction; the worst are full of passionate intensity, carefully hidden behind the Royal Ulster Constabulary's past. The sudden death, apparently in a gas explosion, of Jack's father, a decorated former police officer in the now-reformed RUC, brings his son back from London to Northern Ireland to sort out his mysterious inheritance, which includes a great deal of money from his father's second career as a director of a security company. Although the IRA has been lying low, the British and Irish governments have been negotiating successfully, and prosperity seems on the horizon. Jack gradually suspects his father's death was part of a secret, bloody price for peace. Baker, currently an adviser to the BBC on Northern Ireland, establishes a strong atmosphere for the Troubles' devastating place in people's memories. In a shocking scene early in the narrative, the climate of betrayal is established. Eventually, Jack realizes the extent and menace of police corruption and goes on the run. Meanwhile, his investigation of the links between his father and wealthy businessman Henry Lomax predictably ends with bombs going off and guns blazing. If one too many standard plot devices eventually turn Inheritance into a conventional thriller, Baker's taut pacing, solid characterization and pervasive sense of place keep the narrative tension high.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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