sams84 's review for:

Fifty Dead Men Walking: The Heroic True Story of a British Secret Agent Inside the IRA by Martin McGartland

4.0

---

This is an open and honest account of life working as an informer for the Special Branch from it's start as a young Catholic boy taunting the RUC and the British Army to it's finish as a retired informer hiding from IRA execution squads on the Mainland. McGartland is honest about his views throughout and admits that his views have changed during his life following various events in Northern Ireland. He writes as he would speak, that is readable and more accessible than many of the texts on life for the ordinary person in the Province during the Troubles. McGartland doesn't take sides in his telling of the story, he merely states what he believed at the time and how this governed his actions for the benefit of his community and his country and in doing so he takes the reader on a journey of deceit, betrayal, hatred and violence from which no-one comes out on top.