THE BOY

A very fine debut novel from a future star of Irish crime writing John ConnollyThe Boy is a powerful novel of wasted talent loss greed and revenge but also of discovered genius and life affirming friendship By turns terrifying taut humane and tender it tells the origin story of Ireland s organised crime epidemic with a skill and grace which belies a debut novel and is the calling card of a ringing new voice in Irish fiction When the Guards knock on the door The Boy already knows his mother is dead His father flees to the pub leaving him to wait alone Soon his brother Fallon half protector and half outlaw draws him into a world where grief and crime are rarely separated At the same time a wealthy landowner harbours grotesque secrets in the countryside a hidden family of abducted boys a nightmare lurking beneath respectability As The Boy moves through these fractured worlds his father s guilt his uncle s paramilitary past his brother s violent death he becomes both witness and inheritor of a brutal legacy Think of a space where the layered complexity of Tana French meets the whip smart dialogue and brutal beauty of Colin Barrett and the sharp tenderness and humour of Graeme Armstrong s The Young Team and you re somewhere near where this no