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Garda Inspector Benedict Devlin is a cop with a conscience. He tries to do good when circumstances permit. But as is far too often the case in this imperfect world, good deeds have a tendency to develop unintended consequences. So it is that after a desperate illegal immigrant is killed during a doomed attempt to rob a bank, Devlin tries to help the man's widow, only to find he has landed her in even worse trouble than before. The woman is a Chechen, smuggled into Ireland, drawn by the economic promise of the Celtic Tiger boom and now at the mercy of the thug who smuggled her in and is demanding his payment. There is another little boom going on, at a mine site where gold is being brought out in abundance and where an ancient corpse has just been unearthed, preserved by the bog in which it has lain for centuries. Evidently a sacrificial victim, hers will be but the first of a string of victims who will be sacrificed not for the fertility of the land, but on the altar of greed. Viewed as a police procedural, the Benedict Devlin series is especially attractive. There is very little in the way of flashy forensics or technological wizardry. Perhaps Donegal doesn't run to the latest in gadgetry or, more likely, McGilloway prefers to focus on the human element in policing. Devlin is an admirable protagonist. Never sanctimonious or preachy, he is nevertheless quietly and conventionally religious, reasonably abstemious when it comes to the sins of the flesh (though he does smoke too much), and very far from being a rebel, even though he serves out a disciplinary suspension for much of this novel. He is never ready, however, to go along to get along and this does set him at odds with his more amenable boss. He is, as well, fallible, prone to error and tempted often to revenge. To some extent, the US publishing schedule obscures the degree to which BLEED A RIVER DEEP is quietly prophetic. First published in the UK in April 2009, it must have been written before the full extent of the Irish financial crisis became evident. But at the centre of this book is a persistent questioning of the soundness of the Celtic Tiger economy, a doubt that arises less from economic analysis than from a principled interrogation of the integrity of those giddily blowing financial smoke. There is a lot going on in this novel - money laundering, people smuggling, waterway pollution, and general corruption. McGilloway successfully ties the threads together in a plot which is not too neat for comfort and which resolves in an appropriate way. There is a kind of attractive modesty about this book which Devlin himself articulates on the final page: "...to return to his family, to face his children with a sense of dignity. That is, perhaps, the best for which any of us may aim." § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, December 2010
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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