The Detective Up Late by Adrian McKinty

Publisher's Synopsis

Slamming the door on the hellscape of 1980s Belfast, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy hopes that the 1990s are going to be better for him and the people of Northern Ireland. As a Catholic cop in the mainly Protestant RUC he still has a target on his back, and with a steady girlfriend and a child the stakes couldn’t be higher.

After handling a mercurial triple agent and surviving the riots and bombings and assassination attempts, all Duffy wants to do now is live. But in his final days in charge of Carrickfergus CID, a missing persons report captures his attention. A fifteen-year-old traveler girl has disappeared and no one seems to give a damn about it. Duffy begins to dig and uncovers a disturbing underground of men who seem to know her very well. The deeper he digs the more sinister it all gets. Is finding out the truth worth it if DI Duffy is going to get himself and his colleagues killed? Can he survive one last case before getting himself and his family out over the water?

My Review of The Detective Up Late by Adrian McKinty

“Back to the station through the devastated streets. Past bomb sites turned into parking lots and derelict buildings and huge craters brimming with rainwater. I’m being watched by men in doors and alleyways. A peeler on his own. A tempting target. Death is close here.”

The Detective Up Late is the 7th book in the Sean Duffy series. It’s set in Belfast in 1990 and it follows on quite soon after the events of Police At the Station And They Don’t Look Friendly. Duffy continues to demonstrate that he’s far from your standard peeler with his unconventional methods, sardonic wit and razor sharp mind. 

“I’d be forty in a little over a year and forty in Northern Ireland years was fifty everywhere else, and forty in Northern Irish-policeman years was sixty. And I was a Catholic policeman, so you can do that arithmetic yourself.”

But his time in the RUC is almost up and he’s preparing to move himself, his wife and daughter to Scotland, finally agreeing that remaining in Belfast is too dangerous. But he’s staying on to finish the case he’s currently working on, passing on his wisdom and his wiles to Lawson, the man who would soon replace him.

“Patience - that’s what a good copper needs. Patience in following up all the leads, patience in running through the hordes of data, patience in talking to the general public when most of them are eejits and wankers.”

Kat McAtamney has gone missing in the days leading up to the new year. She’s only 15, but because she’s a Traveller there has been no urgency in looking for her. Duffy takes on the case with alacrity.

Although others believe that the case is a simple runaway because she had disappeared before, Duffy’s not having it and his doggedness is rewarded when he unearths a string of men she regularly met with. Any of these blokes could have been responsible for her disappearance or could at least provide him with information. But there’s no such thing as a straightforward missing child case and everyone’s proving tight-lipped.

Then the shooting starts and Duffy’s last Belfast case starts to look like it could jeopardise his retirement plans. He’s a fighter and always seems to come up with a plan that will squeak him through just about any scrape. 

“I slipped my fist into the knuckleduster. Look away now if you think Sean Duffy is the decent man who fights fair. He doesn’t fight fair. He fights very fucking unfair.”

As far as the mystery itself goes, what starts out as a pretty standard type of missing person / murder case becomes a more substantial whodunnit. With a number of possible suspects, it very much becomes a game of eeny-meeny-miney-mo to challenge us into figuring out who’s guilty. 

As with the previous books in the series, McKinty manages to draw you right into the story with a writing style that is both descriptive and evocative, yet sparse and direct. The plotting is tight and the characters are brought to life with a simple accented phrase that manages to place them perfectly. The tone is bang on and the dialogue perfectly defines the personality of each successive character Duffy meets.

This is more than a simple missing persons case that allows a bunch of coppers to go through their procedural pacings. There are moments of deeper introspection and reflection interspersed with some insightful commentary on societal norms, wry humour used to good effect at regular intervals. Slower, methodical moments of detective work are tempered by flashes of sparkling action to keep the pulse-rate high.

Yet another outstanding entry in the Sean Duffy series to cement Adrian McKinty as one of the finest exponents of the crime fiction genre and a very easy 5 star rating from me.