'Islandbridge'

Dublin 1983
Garda Declan Kelly is working his last off-duty shift outside of a nightclub when he witnesses a double murder in an alleyway. Spared a bullet in the back of the head, Kelly is snared instead by the crime family involved in the murders. They soon force him into an impossible position, and he kills himself. His note to his pregnant wife brings her not just grief but an overpowering rage, and the desire for revenge on all who let her husband down – including the police themselves. Before his suicide, Kelly had asked for help and advice from his Sergeant. The reply was a cold demand to turn himself in, as a criminal.

Dublin 2005
An uneasy Inspector Minogue sits in on an interview arranged by his friend Tommy (‘Molly’) Malone of the Drug Squad. Lawless, the jittery, addicted informant, retails a rumour about a Dublin crime boss having a senior Garda officer ‘on side’ for many years. Lawless also tells the detectives that the death of an undercover detective, Emmet Condon, was because he was nosing around this rumour. The Condon file has been firewalled after the obsequies of his funeral, and muffled. It is believed that Condon himself was ‘dirty.’ Cocaine and booze were in his bloodstream, and he had undocumented informants and connections with criminals.
Minogue is wary and wonders if a rumour that Malone has ‘lost it’ may be true. Malone is bitter, and vulnerable, after the drug overdose death of his own brother last year. There have been incidents of Malone roughing up suspects. Is Malone himself being played by these powerful crime families?. Minogue’s old friend and former boss on the Murder Squad, Superintendent Jim Kilmartin, tells Minogue to stay clear of Malone.

Minogue is summoned to a meeting with the head of Internal Affairs, the feared Inspector Eamonn Blake: “What were you Malone doing with Lawless the day before yesterday?” Minogue learns that Lawless, the informant, was murdered last night. Blake then cedes authority to the Garda Commissioner, John Tynan. Tynan is all too well aware that the Condon investigation has cooled, and that there are senior Guards who are not keen to help any inquiry that will show incompetence or worse in the wake of Condon’s death. Tynan seconds the two detectives to go over the Condon file again.
As Minogue and Malone probe the Condon file, they discover that a woman whom Condon briefly lived with, a Moldovan refugee, cannot be found. She could be anywhere in the Europe-wide underworld, or dead. From police colleagues, Minogue hears rumblings of a territorial war brewing between the Irish crime families and their acolytes, and gangsters from Easter Europe flocking to Ireland.

He and Malone trawl the pubs and clubs in the Dublin area, where they finally come in contact with a loosely organized prostitution racket run by an affable, accented ‘George.’ The same ‘George’ is not helpful, and goes to ground in Dublin. The two detectives resume their door-to-door in Dublin’s famous Temple Bar area, asking after the woman and ‘George.’ When ‘George’ reappears, Malone is not going to let him get away with fleeing, and the teeming lanes and streets of central Dublin witness a chase and a violent confrontation. A very oblique follow-up Minogue hears is a mention of a ‘cop who topped himself years ago’: Declan Kelly.

Then he picks up on a follow-on, a mention of a ‘cop who topped himself years ago’: Kelly. Long remarried, Kelly’s widow had changed her Christian name also in an effort to recast a new identity. Her second husband is a Guard who has climbed the ranks steadily, and in a conversation with other Guards, a woman’s name is unwittingly disclosed to Minogue. Stunned, Minogue must now follow up on this information. The story closes on rage and betrayal, and a detective who can only find rest in a remote windswept field facing the Atlantic, shouting things into the long grasses that hiss around him.