In the Morning I'll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty, a Mysterious Review.

Review: Busted from Detective Inspector to Sergeant — and not even Detective Sergeant — Sean Duffy is barely hanging on to his job with the Carrickfergus RUC when he's falsely accused of a hit-and-run while on duty. His superiors offer him a choice: resign with what little pension he's accumulated or be dragged through an official hearing where he'll certainly be fired with no future benefits. He resigns but is soon contacted by British intelligence: they need his help in locating an old schoolmate, one Dermot McCann, who recently escaped from prison, fled to Libya, and is rumored to be back in Ireland planning an attack on the Prime Minister. Duffy refuses until he's offered something he cannot refuse: his former rank as Detective Inspector and the full backing of the British government in carrying out his investigation. But once he's back on the job, he finds — as he fully expected — that no one will talk to him … except the mother of a young woman who died while closing up the bar her family owned, an incident that the police have ruled an accident but she is sure was murder, in In the Morning I'll Be Gone, the third and final book in the "Troubles Trilogy" by Adrian McKinty.

This is a fine conclusion to an exceptional series. The first 100 pages or so are a little slow, as it isn't quite clear how Duffy is going to accomplish his task — if, indeed, he will finish it — when unexpectedly a cleverly devised locked-room murder mystery is introduced. Duffy re-interviews everyone involved — the murder itself is several years old and long-since closed — and ponders all the literary devices that have been used in the past to solve these seemingly impossible cases before stumbling on what must have happened. But that only gets him the current whereabouts of Dermot McCann from the dead woman's mother; what he does with that information is still an unknown. There are brief appearances by real people and references to real events included here, and the Troubles, as they have in the previous books, are more backdrop than front and center, but Sean Duffy and his multi-layered investigation is really what captures the reader's attention. From the opening sentences of the first in the series to the final page of In the Morning I'll Be Gone, this is crime fiction at its very best.

Acknowledgment: Seventh Street Books provided an ARC of In the Morning I'll Be Gone for this review.

The Sun Is God
Seventh Street Books (Trade Paperback), September 2014
ISBN-13: 9781616140687; ISBN-10: 1616140682

Location(s) referenced in In the Morning I'll Be Gone: Belfast, Northern Ireland

In the Morning I'll Be Gone

A Sean Duffy Mystery by Adrian McKinty