Quick Reads: In the Morning I’ll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty

I listened to the audiobook edition of In the Morning I’ll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty, book 3 of the Sean Duffy series, read by the golden-voiced Gerard Doyle.

It’s set in Belfast in the early 1980’s but close to the end, here are headlines that scream about Indira Gandhi’s assassination:

Murdered by her Sikh bodyguards in retaliation for her assault on the Golden Temple. I read the reports, which went on for four pages. It was horrific stuff. There had been retaliatory massacres of Sikhs in Delhi, gun battles in the streets.

The passage ends with a globe-shrinking sardonic aside from the narrator on the effects of British rule in India!

Sean Duffy is a conflicted Catholic cop in the Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) who’s been recruited by MI5 to track down Dermot McCann, an IRA master bomber whose daring escape from the notorious Maze prison is only heightening his legendary status. Is a murder in a pub relevant to this, or a distraction? Was it murder and how was the door locked? All this while the clock ticks down to the 1984 Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, where Mrs. Thatcher is due to give a keynote speech.

McKinty conjures atmosphere, complicates people, sets the historical stage, and pulls it all together with prose that can range from swift and gritty to meditative to sharply poetic. In Duffy he has a protagonist at odds with himself. He’s aware that every action he takes will play out against a larger landscape, yet he’s also deeply suspicious that powers beyond his reach are pulling the strings of his own actions. That interior conflict has the effect of placing this story itself on the world stage, so you know it’s part of a bigger history, a bigger story, a bigger chase for an order with rules and humanity and decency, somewhere in an aspirational future.

And now I want Gerard Doyle to read me all the rest of the books in the series, only there are not enough audiobook hours to spare!