The Day That Never Comes – Caimh McDonnell

Crime Fiction
3*s

This is the second in the Dublin Trilogy written by stand-up comedian Caimh McDonnell and carries on his unique brand of crime fiction and humour from A Man With One of Those Faces onto the next part of Paul, Brigit and Bunny’s journey to see what happens after they form a private detective agency together.

The story doesn’t begin well though as Bunny is missing, Brigit and Paul have had a massive falling out and aren’t speaking and it looks as if their new venture is going to fail before it has even started. Due to the split with Brigit, Paul is holed up in their new office with Maggie, a German Shepherd dog for company. Despite appearances though there is plenty to laugh about from the start, in that ‘if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry’ kind of way. And then a woman in a red dress makes an appointment requesting information on one of the men who has made money in a building venture, to the detriment of taxpayers and investors alike. What she wants to know is who he is seeing behind her back and has chosen the MCM Agency to help her. Paul has to rely on his friend Phil to act as driver as he trails the man while Brigit is busy looking for Bunny who has gone completely to ground.

Once again we have multiple story-lines to follow and plenty of intrigue with absolutely brilliant characters this book has a far more political feel to it. Even those of us who don’t live in Ireland know about the Celtic Tiger and the rapid downturn during the crash in 2007 where the money that had been pumped into Ireland, most specifically Dublin, which left the country with debts and empty offices. In The Day That Never Comes, one such fancy building has become home to political campaigners and the homeless making a stand against those few who made millions through dodgy dealings leaving their investors with nothing, but it all turns particularly nasty when the fraud trial of Hartigan, Blake and Maloney, the three big names in this venture, collapses.

Despite the introduction of some new characters, especially those in the Gardaí I missed the rapport created when the three characters worked together. In this book although they all appear and so  we see their individual investigations moving at a pace, the humour has a slightly different feel to it, so while it’s still very much in evidence, it has a slightly more sardonic comedy – not so much slapstick and far more blackness.

As for the plot well that’s fast and furious and very well executed with the different strands of story winding closer together. If you haven’t read A Man With One of Those Faces you might equate the mentions of humour within this story with a cosy mystery; please don’t. There are some brutal killings in this book which have no place in that genre. This is not a book for those with delicate sensibilities at all.

In many ways this book could serve as a warning to politicians and police forces alike as to what happens when the community you serve gets really fed-up with the decisions made on their behalf.

I’d like to say a huge thank you to the publishers McFori Ink for allowing me to enjoy another outing with these brilliant, and funny characters. The Day That Never Comes was published on 23 January 2017

First Published UK: 23 January 2017
Publisher: McFori Ink
No of Pages:  344
Genre: Crime Fiction – Humour
Amazon UK
Amazon US

The Day That Never Comes – Author Post – Caimh McDonnell

 

I’m delighted to welcome Caimh McDonnell back to my blog to celebrate the publication of his second book in the Dublin Trilogy; The Day That Never Comes which was published on 23 January 2017.

For those of you who haven’t yet read the first, A Man With One of Those Faces, it is currently on offer on Amazon for just 99p or 99c, an absolute bargain for this very funny crime novel!

Without further ado I will hand over to Caimh and his author post.

 

Life Imitating Art

 

In the middle of December I went home to Dublin for a ‘working holiday’ when something very peculiar happened. It was a ‘working holiday’ because I was going over the final, final, final proofs of my latest book The Day That Never Comes that my editor had sent over. This meant sitting in my mother’s backroom while she nipped in every fifteen or so minutes to make sure I wasn’t being disturbed. She’d occasionally mix this with standing outside the door loudly telling my dad to eat his toast more quietly.

 

To give you some background, my book is a crime thriller set in Dublin. One of the things that happens in it is that a group of homeless people take over an office building in central Dublin that the Irish government have left unoccupied. I awoke one morning to an excited email from my friend Brendan in Ghana, who was one of the few people bar my editor who had read the book up until this point. The reason for his excitement was he had been reading the Irish Times online and a group of homeless people had just taken over an office building in central Dublin that the Irish government had left unoccupied.

 

The name of the real building in question is Apollo House and it has been big news in Ireland and has even gained some coverage internationally. Of all the many, many coincidences between Apollo House and the Ark, the real building stands about a four-minute walk across the River Liffey from where I imagined the fake one would be.

 

I currently live in Manchester, which is actually a lot alike Dublin in many ways; sadly one of those is that in the last decade there has been a shocking explosion in homelessness in both cities. It is normally hard in hindsight to recall exactly what inspired the ideas that end up in your book, but I’d be pretty certain that the shanty town that existed on Oxford Road in Manchester that I walked by most days, at least until the authorities ripped it down, was a large part of the inspiration for the fictional ‘Ark’ building that appears in my book.

 

Now, I should point out, the Ark is merely a small part of my novel and it is not a book about homelessness. Really, where its core inspiration comes from is the anger I think most people feel, in Ireland and elsewhere, where they suffered and continue to suffer the effects of an economic collapse that was caused by the reckless actions of a few people. Certainly in Ireland, with the enormous bank bailout that occurred, it feels like there is a well of anger that has never really been dealt with. The driving engine behind my novel is the idea of what would happen if someone decided to extract their revenge by killing the people they hold responsible for the collapse.

 

Still though, the similarities between my fictional Ark and the real Apollo House are frankly a bit freaky. It is very odd as an author to see something you had hypothesized played out in reality. I think I got both the Irish public’s reaction (almost total support) and the Irish government’s response (almost total embarrassment) pretty much bang on. The thing which most caught me by surprise was that I never in a million years thought someone in authority would make the case that these poor people should be evicted from the building and put back on the freezing mid-winter streets ‘for their own safety’. Even in fiction, that seemed like to bizarre and cruel an argument.

 

In reality, the occupants of Apollo House have now been evicted by order of the High Court, once temporary accommodation had been found for them elsewhere.  Their actions have also done an awful lot to raise awareness of an issue that for too long went ignored.

 

Let’s just say, in the fictional version of events in my book, things don’t end quite so peacefully. The Irish government should take note!

The Day That Never Comes

 

Caimh McDonnell
Published 23 January 2017
McFori Ink
340 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9955075-2-4 Paperback
978-0-9955075-3-1 eBook (Kindle)

#DayNeverComes

 

Blurb

Remember those people that destroyed the economy and then cruised off on their yachts? Well guess what – someone is killing them.

Dublin is in the middle of a heat wave and tempers are running high. The Celtic Tiger is well and truly dead, activists have taken over the headquarters of a failed bank, the trial of three unscrupulous property developers teeters on the brink of collapse, and in the midst of all this, along comes a mysterious organisation hell-bent on exacting bloody vengeance in the name of the little guy.

Paul Mulchrone doesn’t care about any of this; he has problems of his own. His newly established detective agency is about to be DOA. One of his partners won’t talk to him for very good reasons and the other has seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth for no reason at all. Can he hold it together long enough to figure out what Bunny McGarry’s colourful past has to do with his present absence?

When the law and justice no longer mean the same thing, on which side will you stand?

The Day That Never Comes is the second book in Caimh McDonnell’s Dublin trilogy, which melds fast-paced action with a distinctly Irish acerbic wit.

If you haven’t read the A Man with One of Those Faces what are you waiting for? Don’t hang about, it is very funny and currently available for 99p/99c from 23 – 30 January 2017!

If you should need any persuasion to click the buy button, you can read my review here

Amazon UK
Amazon US

 

I will be reviewing The Day That Never Comes very soon, but if you can skip that and buy the book now, here are the links

Amazon UK
Amazon US

This Week in Books (January 25)

Hosted by Lipsyy Lost & Found my Wednesday post gives you a taste of what I am reading this week. A similar meme is run by Taking on a World of Words

My current read is The Good People by Hannah Kent which will be published on 9 February 2017. This is a much anticipated read following the brilliance which was Burial Rites.Burial Rites

Blurb

County Kerry, Ireland, 1825.
NÓRA, bereft after the sudden death of her beloved husband, finds herself alone and caring for her young grandson Micheál. Micheál cannot speak and cannot walk and Nóra is desperate to know what is wrong with him. What happened to the healthy, happy grandson she met when her daughter was still alive?
MARY arrives in the valley to help Nóra just as the whispers are spreading: the stories of unexplained misfortunes, of illnesses, and the rumours that Micheál is a changeling child who is bringing bad luck to the valley.
NANCE’s knowledge keeps her apart. To the new priest, she is a threat, but to the valley people she is a wanderer, a healer. Nance knows how to use the plants and berries of the woodland; she understands the magic in the old ways. And she might be able to help Micheál.
As these three women are drawn together in the hope of restoring Micheál, their world of folklore and belief, of ritual and stories, tightens around them. It will lead them down a dangerous path, and force them to question everything they have ever known.

My latest read is The Day That Never Comes by Caimh McDonnell the second in the second in the very funny Dublin Trilogy. If you haven’t yet read the first, A Man With One of Those Faces, it is just 99p or 99c until 30 January 2017 on Amazon.

Blurb

Remember those people that destroyed the economy and then cruised off on their yachts? Well guess what – someone is killing them.

Dublin is in the middle of a heat wave and tempers are running high. The Celtic Tiger is well and truly dead, activists have taken over the headquarters of a failed bank, the trial of three unscrupulous property developers teeters on the brink of collapse, and in the midst of all this, along comes a mysterious organisation hell-bent on exacting bloody vengeance in the name of the little guy.

Paul Mulchrone doesn’t care about any of this; he has problems of his own. His newly established detective agency is about to be DOA. One of his partners won’t talk to him for very good reasons and the other has seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth for no reason at all. Can he hold it together long enough to figure out what Bunny McGarry’s colourful past has to do with his present absence?

When the law and justice no longer mean the same thing, on which side will you stand? Amazon

Next up is The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman which has been on the TBR since September 2015.

Blurb

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER is a story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women’s health, both physical and mental.

Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer. Foregoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment she is forbidden from working, and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of exercise and air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency”, a diagnosis common to women in that period. She hides her journal from her husband and his sister the housekeeper, fearful of being reproached for overworking herself. The room’s windows are barred to prevent children from climbing through them, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, though she and her husband have access to the rest of the house and its adjoining estate. Amazon

I think that has to be the widest spread of genres I’ve ever managed in one of these posts!

So what are you reading this week? Go on you know you want to share!