The Ghosts of Belfast

Fegan has been a "hard man," an IRA killer in Northern Ireland who served a dozen years in the Maze Prison. Now that peace has come, he is being haunted, day and night, by the ghosts of twelve of his innocent victims: a mother and infant, a schoolboy, a butcher, a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and seven others. In order to appease them, he's going to have to kill the men who gave him his orders.

But for the first time in his life he's fallen in love—with Marie McKenna, a woman who has a little girl. She had taken an RUC officer as a lover and is still shunned for this act of disloyalty. Marie and her daughter offer Fegan the prospect of a new life, and the possibility of redemption. But they are also potential hostages, which makes doing what he has to do much harder. Is this Fegan's ultimate mistake? As the mother of a boy he killed once told him, "Sooner or later, everybody pays."

"The best first novel I've read in years. It crackles. It grips you by the throat. It's a flat-out terror trip. This is some guy to watch out for in a dark alley." — James Ellroy

"Not only one of the finest thriller debuts of the last ten years, but also one of the best Irish novels, in any genre, of recent times." — John Connolly