Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2008
240 pages
Genre: Mysteries
Publication Information
Winter 2002. The corpse of local teenager Angela Cashell is found on the Tyrone-Donegal border, between the North and South of Ireland, in an area known as the Borderlands. Garda Inspector Benedict Devlin heads the investigation. The only clues are a gold ring placed on the girl’s finger and an old photograph, left where she died.
While Devlin searches for the girl’s killer, her father has his own ideas about who is responsible—and his own ideas about how to make them pay. Meanwhile, Devlin becomes reacquainted with an old flame eager to rekindle their affair.
Then another teenager is murdered, and Devlin unearths a link between the recent killings and the disappearance of a prostitute twenty-five years earlier—a case in which he fears one of his own colleagues is implicated. As a thickening snow storm blurs the border between North and South, Devlin finds the distinction between right and wrong, vengeance and justice, and even police officer and criminal becoming equally unclear.
"A keen observer, Devlin has just enough flaws to make him an empathetic hero." - Publishers Weekly.
"Public libraries should welcome this worthy addition to the growing body of police procedurals set in Ireland." - Library Journal.
"McGilloway's debut is marked by tangled, derivative plotting, exceptionally mature prose and a hero as charismatically volcanic in his own way as Louisiana's Dave Robicheaux. " - Kirkus Reviews.
"Brian McGilloway's command of plot and assurance of language make it difficult to believe that Borderlands is his debut." - The London Times (UK).
"A mystery of labyrinthine complexity" - Sunday Telegraph (UK)
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