ALL THEM DOGS

A debut novel of rare force and control.

This is a revelation: a mob thriller steeped in the gallows humor of working-class Dublin, yet with notes of tenderness to temper the violence. As narrated by Tony Ward—“lethal weapon forged in 1997 with a rap sheet that’d put them all to shame”—White hauls us through a world of coke dealers, shredded loyalties, and powder-keg masculinity. Finto Maher, with “gnashers like he had the back side of a train ticket stuffed into his mouth,” sends Wardy and the disconcertingly beautiful Darren “Flute” Walsh to collect from Patsy, a doomed waster with a baby and a habit of diluting whatever Finto’s already adulterated. Flute is the stepson of Aengus Lavelle, the boxing-gym kingpin at the center of Ireland’s drug trade, and he exerts his pull on Wardy from the start. White writes desire with the same precision he brings to violence: Wardy studies Flute’s cheekbones, his “Garda flashlight” gaze, the perfect teeth he’s never seen break into a smile. He’s unnerved because Flute stirs emotions that conjure memories of Philly Mooney, a beloved mentor lost to a revenge killing that Wardy may have set in motion. White has a gift for the grotesquely visceral: a dealer’s skin “you could grate cheese on,” a shrinking postcoital penis “like a poked slug.” By the time Wardy and Flute finally lock into each other, first in a coke-fugged pantry, then later to Dusty Springfield spinning in Flute’s flat, you feel their deep physical and emotional need every bit as keenly as you feel the hopelessness of their situation.

White keeps us balanced on a knife-edge, and the novel’s final revelations churn for days.