The Gombeen Man

Reunited with old friends and lovers at the funeral of friend and IRA hero Connor Larkin, American reporter Con Edwards quickly becomes involved in the intrigue surrounding Irish politics and terrorism

The convoluted politics of Northern Ireland and the hatreds of generations permeate this fine, atmospheric thriller. In 1979 American reporter Con Edwards buries his friend Conor Larkin, a retired Irish Republican Army gunman shot on the docks of Manchester. Con joins forces with Maeve Nolan, Larkin's widow and a former lover of his own, to find the motive for the killing, which has drawn the interest of British security forces. Two attempts on their lives in England cause the couple to flee to Ireland and search for allies in treacherous crosscurrents of contending revolutionary groups--the Provos, the traditional IRA and NORAID (Irish Northern Aid Committee). Meanwhile, suspicion and anticipation surround the possibility of peace and prosperity offered by the Porcupine Banks Project, aimed at drilling for oil in the Irish Sea. The project's publicist, Liam Drumm, long a Provo, aids the search for Larkin's killer, which confirms the dead man's suspicion that there has been an informer--a gombeen man--in Provo ranks. Tracing the roots of the current troubles to 1971 Belfast, where both Maeve and Con were imprisoned and tortured, Eickhoff ( A Hand to Execute ) uncovers an unholy alliance as he builds suspense, its credibility heightened by reference to actual incidents and personages.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A second novel from Eickhoff (A Hand to Execute, 1987), this one about an American reporter who allows himself to be sucked into the shadowy politics of the IRA. Pulitzer Prize-winner Con Edwards got his first close look at The Troubles in Northern Ireland in the early 1970's when the IRA's campaign of violence was at its bloodiest and British countermeasures were most repressive. Provided entree into the IRA by Conor Larkin, a poet and academician who was himself once an IRA warrior, Edwards found himself on the front lines of the undeclared civil war in Belfast and was even swept into a British prison along with Maeve Nolan, an attractive Catholic partisan. The brief prison spell was long enough to do in Edwards's journalistic objectivity. He was angry enough to participate in the successful effort to spring Maeve, who was held and brutalized for months by the British. At the end of the decade, Edwards returns for the funeral of the murdered Conor Larkin and takes up again with Maeve, Larkin's widow. The two begin a search to find Larkin's murderers and their motive--a search that takes them straight back to the tough men of the IRA and the realization that there is a traitor at the top of the organization, someone whose victims include the hope of peace for the island. Tight, unsentimental, and menacing Irish thriller by a thoroughly skillful American. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

American journalist Con Edwards returns to Northern Ireland to attend the funeral of an old friend, IRA hero Connor Larkin. At the funeral, Con gets reacquainted with fellow journalist Liam Drumm and with Maeve, Larkin's widow and Con's former lover. Eight years ago, the three were betrayed by an informer known as "the gombeen man" and cruelly interrogated by British agents. When Maeve and Con decide to investigate the suspicious circumstances of Larkin's death, assassination attempts follow them across Ireland. Eickhoff ( A Hand to Execute , LJ 7/87) creates a fast pace and a vivid atmosphere, but he strains credulity with unlikely plot developments, in particular the highly improbable candor of a police inspector with a foreign reporter. Entertaining, but not an essential purchase.
- Ruth M. Ross, Olympic Coll. Lib., Bremerton, Wash.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.