A STONE OF THE HEART

It looks like a routine bank job. But when hotheaded Belfast Supt. Cecil Megarry, called back to the force after a suspension he'd planned to make permanent, realizes that the thieves overlooked not only a cache of jewels but a regularly scheduled payroll in their haste to lift some apparently valueless personal papers from a vault, he knows he's on the trail of something much bigger and more sinister. He's on the trail, in factthough he doesn't know it yetof Sean Morgan, a young barman who's been recruited by shop-owner James Cronin to steal a car and then drive it on some unspecified but manifestly dangerous errand. McEldowney spins out the cat-and-mouse byplay between Megarry and Morgan expertlythere's a particularly effective episode in which Morgan, all innocence, takes the stolen car out for a spin and drives into the most unexpected kind of troublebefore revealing a rather too pat connection between the two antagonists just as he finally brings them face to face. Megarry's hair-trigger temper is under better control this time than in his debut (A Kind of Homecoming, 1994), but you still wouldn't want to cross the man. Think of J.J. Marric's George Gideon with eternal indigestion.