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A review by cnorbury
Black Irish by Stephan Talty
4.0
An excellent debut novel. The MC, Absalom Kearney, is flawed but sympathetic, as a good MC should be. She deals with plenty of demons, past and present, in solving a series of murders that greatly affect "The County"--that part of Buffalo, NY that is almost exclusively Irish. The County is considered to be a near equivalent to one of the counties in Ireland.
Talty sets a dark tone for his story. Rundown, bleak-winter Buffalo is the backdrop, and the gritty, poor, insular, mistrustful, people of The County have little to be optimistic about, so they concentrate on protecting their turf and secrets from outsiders, of which Absalom Kearney is despite her adoptive father being one of the most inside insiders.
I had a few criticisms of some technical things such as the overemphasis of Kearney's Saab and her penchant for fast driving and squealing tires. Talty also used a fair number of adverbs, most notably "suddenly," which I counted several times in chapter one.
But the plot was well constructed, with some good twists toward the end.
Talty sets a dark tone for his story. Rundown, bleak-winter Buffalo is the backdrop, and the gritty, poor, insular, mistrustful, people of The County have little to be optimistic about, so they concentrate on protecting their turf and secrets from outsiders, of which Absalom Kearney is despite her adoptive father being one of the most inside insiders.
I had a few criticisms of some technical things such as the overemphasis of Kearney's Saab and her penchant for fast driving and squealing tires. Talty also used a fair number of adverbs, most notably "suddenly," which I counted several times in chapter one.
But the plot was well constructed, with some good twists toward the end.