FALLON'S WAKE

Three years ago IRA assassin Tomas Fallon retired from the killing business and settled into a small cottage on Long Woman’s Grave. One rainy day two armed men arrive at his door. He disarms them handily and has them lead him to his beleaguered old IRA boss, Seamus MacCauley, who tells him of the Peace Accord about to be signed tomorrow but also shows him photos of dead children, including MacCauley’s niece, tortured to death in a drug-traffic slaying. MacCauley wants Fallon to take out the smugglers. When three men from the rival Ulster Defense League try to assassinate him for all the UDL widows he piled up earlier, yet are themselves killed by the bomb meant for him, Fallon sees he won—t have a personal peace accord. Still, putting himself up against international criminals might bring one kind of peace and dissolve the dead he keeps under ice in his soul—if he’s not betrayed. Eickhoff’s cool, clear, unsentimental style keeps his plot knotted until it sweats. The Sorrows, the third volume in his marvelous trilogy The Ulster Cycle, about Cuchulain (The Raid, 1997, and The Feast, p. 255), will appear in March 2000.