those irish are talkers. If you like dialogue then this is your book. ( )

Brady just keeps getting better and better. the voice of his fourth policeman, inspector Matt Minogue of the Garda, even in the third person, is here pretty much part of his stream of consciousness, and he's thinking as much about his own family, and the people he works with and for, and the state of the land he walks, as he is about the case at hand.

his famously difficult artist daughter Iseult, now heavily pregnant, is publicly showing an artwork depicting The Holy Family wrapped in barbed wire, and Minogue keeps glancing off just what she's delivering with that message. in county Mayo there's a dig called Carra Fields that might be two millennia older than the first pyramids. meanwhile there's endless banter about the accents and common features of all the provinces and counties. and there are endlessly droll exchanges with his colleagues, on art and politics and heritage, mostly delivered in deadpan rounds so pointed that Flann O'Brien would have been pleased to have written them, and Minogue seems to live in his territory anyhow, right down to the cruiskeen lawn.

the writing is so lyrical, you can hear the lilt of all those country accents colliding, declaiming, harmonies rising, until the flatter tones of the North American speakers only seem to define the differences in method and tone and thinking as they're read by a country of poets. who may or may not be so much lost as displaced in time from a possibly-mythical peaceful kingdom that came before all the patriarchal heroes, here represented as the lands and family of a prehistoric Carra king.

which may be the country of Minogue's dreams, but not so much the one he's got. but anyhow Minogue thinks of this less as science than as grafted story: the tendency of the Irish to reinvent themselves at every turn. but whose turn is this? and in his own story, he has difficulty finding his road, or claiming a rightaway; the case develops as a set of roadblocks to knock down. in spite of politics, flu, a pretty comprehensive coverup, and all these killer asides that try to divert him from the subject at hand, Minogue pursues his case single-mindedly, shot at and lied to and sat on until he finally loses his temper, continuing till the whole affair at last comes clear.

so in the tradition of the Carra king, and like another ancient king he knows called Sisyphus, Minogue too finds himself taking the measure of heavy stones with an eye to rolling them up to the crown of the hill, asserting his sovereign claim to deal, only to find the weight of them rolling back down on him again. Minogue the king of nothing much in a more dangerous and confusing time, bogged down and isolated, rules as he must both in and out of time on landscape, family, survival, and justice. ( )