In a cinema verite style, Hugo Hamilton decimates cliches of cops and robbers with doses of smoldering Irish sectarianism and the realities of a seedy, postindustrial Dublin. "Coyne is a majestic creation.... If Flann O'Brien's lunatic Professor De Selby had genetically engineered a cross between the novels of Raymond Chandler and those of Patrick McCabe, this is what the progeny might well have looked like." - The Times (London)