Items related to Tapes of the River Delta
Synopsis
Committing a murder after thinking about doing so for most of his life, Irish fugitive Theo Shortcourse remembers the events that led up to his act, in a chilling saga that spans three generations of a nineteenth-century town. A first novel.
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About the Author
Peter Cunningham grew up in Waterford, the city on which Monument, the town on which Tapes of the River Delta is based. His previous work includes a number of thrillers, written both under his own name and under pseudonyms. His novels include Consequences of the Heart and The Sea and the Silence (from the Monument series), Who Trespass Against Us, Taoiseach and Capital Sins. Peter Cunningham is a member of Aosdána, the Irish Academy of Letters, and lives in Kildare, Ireland.
From Kirkus Reviews
The knotted history of a modern Irish family is embedded in a quasi-political debut thriller, a combination providing less than stellar results. Sixtyish and desperate, Theo Shortcourse is hiding from the police in the river marshes near his childhood home, recording the brutal chronicle of his life on a tape recorder. Theo describes his rather idyllic childhood on the river with his best friend Pax and his nephew (though they're of the same age) Bain. Theo lives with his mother Sparrow in the grand house built by her father, Sammy Tea, while Bain lives with his drunken mother in a slum with Sparrow's long-estranged husband, Pa Shortcourse. Close as boys, the three choose very different paths in adulthood: Pax, the most moral of the three, joins the Guards while Theo, rejecting work in his father's sausage business, goes into a government post in Customs. Bain takes over Pa Shortcourses's butcher shop and begins grooming himself, with all the cunning wit of a street hustler, for a career in politics. Intermingled with Theo's narrative of these lives is the melodramatic history of his family, a record filled with incest, betrayal, and insanity. Pa Shortcourse, hailed as a hero in the Irish struggle for independence, is exposed as a liar and thief. Sammy Tea, Theo's grandfather, disappeared into a madhouse after impregnating his daughter--resulting in the birth of Sparrow. The three old friends eventually find themselves locked in a lethal conflict. Bain, now prime minister, blackmails Theo to help him pass missiles intended for the IRA through customs. Pax, determined to expose them, is hot on their trail. Though undeniable voyeuristic interest is created in the revelation of Shortcourse family secrets, the political aspect feels tacked on to support a narrative that tends toward the tedious and rambling. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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- PublisherSt Martins Pr
- Publication date1996
- ISBN 10 0312140517
- ISBN 13 9780312140519
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages344
- Rating
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