Bought and read in Dublin, yay. An Irish writer…who sets his mysteries in America; this one in New York City and New Orleans. If you, like me, have British relatives and friends who get completely BENT OUT OF SHAPE when some American writer sets their books ‘cross the pond and gets little details wrong… Yeah, I kind of had to shake my head and laugh at seeing the opposite occur. (Not that he’s “British” being “Irish” but the correlation is there regardless.)

In some ways, it’s a mystery series like any other: an ex-cop Charlie Bird, with a sad personal history of violence, winds up involved in a mystery, has some criminal friends and some not, there’s really brutal murder and mayhem. The additional spin here is that this has far more than your average mystery’s amount of psychology and mythology running under it. Bird’s thoughts often go wandering off for a bit into an underlying sort of swirl of emotion and ESP like feelings. Sometimes it added interesting themes and I went with it; other times I wanted him to get back to solving the mystery already!

Dark, gruesome, brutal. Some horrible stuff happens to quite a few people. Pretty frakkin’ intense. (In a good way. Obviously.)