The Advocate's Betray by Teresa Burrell

Goodreads | Eric_W Welch (Forreston, IL)'s review of The Advocate's Betrayal:

I was a bit disappointed in this book, hoping that it would be a legal battle.  I love well-written courtroom scenes.  Instead it was a mish-mash of romance and investigation with just a wee bit of courtroom work on a case that was peripheral to the main plot.

Betty's husband, John, is attacked and killed one evening, in their trailer. Betty and John were apparently Sabre's good friends, although there is little evidence (back-story) of that friendship.  Mostly we just take her word for it. Sabre, our legal-beagle heroine (very attractive, of course) is being wooed by Luke (he is a hunk, of course,) but she's also lusted after by her JP, her P.I., who seems to be the most competent individual in the story, not to mention Bob, a legal colleague. The story twists here and there as Sabre realizes that Betty is not telling her the truth and nothing is it appears. I was disappointed in the ending which seemed to be antithetical to the story being told by the killer.

I don't mean to be too negative because the story did hold my interest, and the writing is competent. According to her bio, Teresa Burrell  is an attorney whose practice is largely devoted to juvenile court and now, semi-retired is focused on promoting children's issues. Sabre is supposed to be a child advocate, so  I think the book would have been much better had she built a plot around some child advocacy issue as they did on the better shows of The Guardian before it devolved into melodramatic soap between the characters.  Perhaps her other books do.  2.576 stars.



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Falling Glass by Adrian McKinty

Audiobook read with the classic Irish brogue by Gerald Doyle. There's a great scene in the beginning where Killian, sent to either kill or get money from a man with huge gambling debts, talks his way out of a desperate situation where the debtor gets the drop on him with a shotgun. In the end, both he, the man, and Killian's boss make out financially well. Classic

Killian, having long retired as an IRA fixer, has watched his real estate investments go bad as the economy tanks in Ireland.  So when the offer of an extremely well-paying job comes along, ostensibly simple, to find and retrieve the ex-wife and daughters of an extremely wealthy airline owner, Killian agrees to take the job.  Nothing is ever simple nor as it appears, and while Richard Coulter, his employer insists it's only about getting his daughters back, there's also a laptop that figures in the equation, not to mention an ex-military Russian who wants to earn the reward, too and will stop at nothing to get it.

There's an interesting subtext to the book:  an examination and brief history of the Pavee** travellers, not Romani Gypsies as the author is at pains to point out, but some say the original settlers of Ireland. Some readers may find these digressions as distracting;  I did not. I enjoy a little social history with my fiction. These "tinkers" as they are also known, earn their living as free-spirited wandering carnival operators.  Subject to extreme hostility and prejudice, Killian has roots in the community which helps him extricate himself, Rachel and the girls from the devastating information they discover on the laptop, information that could destroy the peace-process and bring down the government and many wealthy men.

This story will grab you and not let go until the end.

**From the Wikipedia: "The historical origins of Irish Travellers as an ethnic group has been a subject of academic and popular debate. Such discussions have been difficult as Irish Travellers left no written records of their own.[23][24]In 2011 an analysis of DNA from 40 Travellers was undertaken at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin and the University of Edinburgh. The study provided evidence that Irish Travellers are a distinct Irish ethnic minority, who separated from the settled Irish community at least 1000 years ago; the claim was made that they are distinct from the settled community as Icelanders are from Norwegians.[25] Even though all families claim ancient origins, not all families of Irish Travellers date back to the same point in time; some families adopted Traveller customs centuries ago, while others did so more recently.[26] It is unclear how many Irish Travellers would be included in this distinct ethnic group at least from a genetic perspective.

    There has been a wide range of theories speculating their origins such as that they were descended from those Irish who were made homeless by Oliver Cromwell's military campaign in Ireland in the 1650s, or possibly from the people made homeless in the 1840s famine due to eviction, or the descendants of aristocratic nomads the Clan Murtagh O'Connors in the Late Middle Ages. Their nomadism was based on cattle-herds or creaghts.

    There is evidence that, by the 12th century, the name Tynkler and Tynker emerged in reference to a group of nomads who maintained a separate identity, social organization, and dialect.[23] The genetic evidence indicates Irish Travellers have been a distinct ethnic group in Ireland for at least a millennium."

Bad Boy by Peter Robinson

"My daughter has a gun." Banks is on holiday, but that's the concern a woman brings to Annie, Banks's DI, while Banks is on vacation. Even though unlicensed handgun possession carries a very steep penalty, the police completely over-react (Banks is on vacation) and the girl's father gets hit with a tazer and dies of a heart attack. Cut to a scene with the daughter's friends and we learn things are not quite so simple.

Soon, Banks' daughter is linked to Jaff, drugs, and attempted murder. Banks' former lover and DI Annie Cabbot investigates while Superintendent Chambers tries to paper over the fustercluck created by his armed response team.

The scene shifts to Geoff and Tracy who are soon on the run from the cops and Banks arrives home from his vacation in San Francisco to find a perfect mess.

I have to say that Tracy Banks has got to be one of the dumbest daughters to come down the pike.  There were numerous opportunities for her to make a bad situation better, but she seemed to lack the gumption to react positively to her dilemma. The few times when she made a feeble attempt, she mishandled it badly.

There are a couple of interesting new characters -- at least I believe they are new at this point in the series: Constable Nerys Powell, a member of the armed response team who has a crush on DI Cabott. Like Banks, she ignores regulations, in this case saving the day.  I also liked DS  Winsome Jackman, a statuesque, bright, and clever professional detective. The solution to the plot is intellectually unsatisfying. A decent story but not one of Robinson's better novels.

Simon Prebble's very competent narration has trouble salvaging a weak story.

Until Death by James L. Thane | LibraryThing

Until Death by James L. Thane | LibraryThing:



I read the first in the Sean Richardson series and liked it. This 2nd is even better 

The mark of a good entertainment, regardless of genre, is being compelled by the story to get back to it and see what happens. Until Death meets that test handsomely. 

Sean is still despondent over the death of his wife several months earlier and Maggie has her own romantic pressures. I liked the relationship between the two: supportive and friendly without the "jump-in-the-sack" syndrome that bedevils so many partner relationships. 

A man is bludgeoned to death in his garage. There are no clues. Then three other men are gunned down in seemingly random fashion, except they had been killed with the same gun. Things get interesting when a high-priced escort comes forward to reveal she had lost her client list (in a day-planner, no less) and realized all three of the men had been her clients. Sean and "Maggs," are stumped; they have a plethora of suspects but all seem to have solid alibis. 

By Part II some of the best suspects have been killed and a new one is revealed (I was surprised by who took the client book and his motive is never revealed.) 

Really don't want to drop any spoilers in here. Just buy and read the book. Very enjoyable. 

P.S. I would *really* like to meet Gina Gallagher.



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Peeler by Kevin McCarthy | LibraryThing

Peeler by Kevin McCarthy | LibraryThing:

The book takes place shortly after WW I.  Tensions between the Army, IRA, and local cops are horrible, with each shooting the other almost at will.  Going out after curfew risks being shot by either side.

Peeler is the derogatory word for policeman in Ireland.  The book begins in 1920 with the discovery of a woman's body splayed out on the side of a hill, naked and tarred and feathered with the word "Trator" [sic] written on a plank on her chest.  Being a policeman (RIC for Royal Irish Constabulary) in the "troubles" was a terrifying job and before they could inspect the body they had to have an army patrol search the hillside for potential snipers and ambush. But the IRA wants to know who did the crime as well.  The signature of the killing is an ice pick through the back of the brain.  And then similar killings happen.

The summer 2008 issue of Mystery Review Journal has a very interesting article by Jim Doherty ("Just the Facts: Mole to Manhunter") that discusses the relationship between the RIC and the British government. His article is very helpful in sorting out the intricacies of the relationships of the RIC, Black and Tans, Irish Volunteers and the Reserve forces.  There are a bewildering number of abbreviations. He notes,

 "As a policeman myself, I’m, at best, ambivalent about this strategy, but I can understand it. The fact is the main armed force maintaining British rule in Ireland was not the Army, but the police. Indeed, the most infamous enemies of the Irish Volunteers during the War for Independence, the notorious Black and Tans, were not a branch of the British Army, as is commonly supposed, but the Reserve Force of the RIC. Moreover, if you regard yourself as being at war, and the war you have to fight is a guerilla war against an occupying force, cops are, frankly, legitimate military targets. During World War II, would French resistance fighters, for example, have been wrong to target Gestapo officers, or even collaborating Surete officers, on the grounds that they were cops, not soldiers? Or were members of the Gestapo just as legitimate a target as, say, members of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS, or the Luftwaffe?

I don’t mean to suggest that officers in the RIC or the DMP were comparable to the Gestapo. That would be not only fatuous, but terribly unjust. Nevertheless, there’s no denying that the British-backed police in Ireland played essentially the same role there that the German-backed police did in occupied France. And, if members of the Irish Volunteers, soon to be known as the Irish Republican Army (and known today as the “Old IRA,” to distinguish it from later groups using the same name), sincerely believed that their war for independence was justified, then it followed that those British-backed police were legitimate targets."

O'Keefe is a dedicated cop and goes where the leads take him.  Unfortunately they lead him to waters where the powers that be, i.e. the British, would rather not have them go. And the IRA want the killer caught as well.  And he has to control his men from beating up civilians who they think are responsible for allowing ambushes of their men.  It's a mess.

McCarthy does a very nice job of creating an atmosphere of the geography and time. I hope he writes more of Sean O'Keefe.



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