BENEATH THE SURFACE

It’s open season on Ireland’s government, with some intimates marked for violent death literally in the corridors of power and others slated for takedown by more insidious means.

DI Tom Reynolds, the head of the Dublin Garda’s murder squad, is called to Leinster House, seat of the Irish parliament, in response to a grisly discovery. Ryan Finnegan, the political adviser to Aidan Blake, Minister for State Resources and Energy Efficiency, has been found shot to death in the arms of a statue inside an underground tunnel that connects the two houses of parliament. It’s not clear which scandal is worse—the murder of a well-connected political hand inside the most heavily guarded building in the country or the discovery of a lurid photograph beneath Finnegan’s body. Despite the apparently secure location, suspects are everywhere, from Carl Madsen, the powerful executive of the Danish energy company Udforske, who’s been secretly working to shape a crucial piece of energy legislation Blake is shepherding, to Darragh McNally, chair of the majority Reform Party, whose elderly mother’s death leaves him utterly alone despite the formidable political power he’s amassed. But Reynolds (With Our Blessing, 2019, etc.) and the team of investigators he’s assembled keep coming back to Blake, whom they catch in one lie after another. His meeting with Madsen on the night of the murder never happened. He’s a member of a secret men’s club devoted to discreet sexual encounters. He’s one of the men pictured in the photograph police found at the murder scene. And he’s been blackmailed to change that far-reaching energy plan. As the evidence against Blake mounts and his explanations become increasingly baroque, Spain keeps up the pressure on the other suspects and ends up indicting an entire generation of Irish politicians, whether or not they get arrested for murder.

Honest detection, layers upon layers of deception, and juicy revelations about high-flying pols. What’s not to like?