Review: The Troubles and the mob bring back a favorite detective in ’Hang On St. Christopher'

The eighth Sean Duffy novel by terrific Irish writer Adrian McKinty is a dusted-off story we’ve heard a million times.

Don’t care.

Burned-out star detective with spotty record pushes papers and waits a couple years until his pension fully vests. Bosses beg him to take on one last case. Like the “one final heist” plot of countless crime procedurals, this setup is a cliché.

Doesn’t matter.

It’s a good one — a shotgun murder (and then another) with menacing tentacles that reach into the upper echelons of Irish crime and politics, as well as an initially frustrating lack of leads.

Duffy agrees to take the case and insists on working it with longtime partner Sgt. John McCrabban, who’s also semi-retired. They puzzle over the shooting of a man living comfortably under an assumed name. When the deceased turns out to be an IRA triggerman, it becomes obvi this is not a random carjacking.

Even better. Belfast-born McKinty, who has lived outside of Northern Ireland for decades, delights in the irresistible/repellent particulars of his native country: perversely bad weather, the brooding Irish Sea, cozy pubs, sectarian street riots, roadblocks, a culture that reveres drinking (tea and alcohol), a bookshop that draws an SRO crowd for a poetry reading, the posh and the proletarian.

Duffy is attentive to both the gritty appeal of the city and green beauty of the countryside. He invokes Ireland’s ancient history as easily as recalling an anecdote. A town near the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland may be “suburban and gentle and dull” in 1992, but it is “where Cuchulainn launched his war against the queen of Connacht; this was where the Vikings invaded eastern Ulster, where the Normans stretched the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement, where Edward Bruce had himself crowned king of Ireland.”

In the novel, the worst of The Troubles are over, but peace between warring factions is not at hand. As a Catholic and a cop, Duffy is hated by many. Every time he is about to speed off in his BMW, he checks for a bomb.

The best part. Sean Duffy, 40, is deeply flawed. His record as a homicide detective combines a tepid “solve” rate with spectacular wins. He is off cigarettes, but drinks heavily. He very nearly cheats on Beth, his common-law wife and the mother of his daughter. He wades into fights he easily could avoid. He’s an adrenaline junkie for whom a retirement of birding and golf is unimaginable.

Still, a dented halo remains a halo. Kitted up in black jeans, Doc Martens boots, leather jacket and “lucky” Che Guevara T-shirt, Duffy springs into action no matter the hour or his degree of drunkenness. Using only lines of a poem by Lord Byron, Duffy deflects a threat from a neighborhood thug. Using only a hurley stick, he knocks sense into a threatening hoodlum. Courage, then, and a love of “the chase across the savanna” ingrained by “a million years of evolution.”

Importantly, Duffy is self-aware, frequently acknowledging his fears or chastising himself for bonehead moves.

Duffy is hilariously literate, an opinionated fanboy ready to defend Nirvana against naysayers. Rock not pop. Authentic jazz not nervous cocktail music. He loves Arvo Pärt and Brian Eno. When was the last time a thriller name-dropped Eno’s classic “Music for Airports”?

Don’t be misled, however. This is a cop novel that fully satisfies its genre expectations — chases, gun battles, sinister bad guys, questionable cops, cowards and heroes. “Hang On St. Christopher” exceeds expectations in a full-throttle resolution, including a mad series of flights to Iceland and the U.S. that is about more than just killing all the bad guys.

Claude Peck is a former Star Tribune columnist and editor. He lives in Minneapolis and Palm Springs.

Hang On St. Christopher

By: Adrian McKinty.

Publisher: Blackstone, 343 pages; $28.99.