Inheritance

A debut thriller set in a Northern Ireland where the Troubles have been over for twenty years. When a retired RUC officer is blown up in a gas explosion in his caravan, his son inherits a key to the past, and as he uncovers the truth about his father's death, he stumbles across a conspiracy of daring and awesome greed.

BBC journalist Keith Baker mines his longtime Northern Ireland beat to create a saga of personal and political revenge. Inheritance, his first foray into fiction, opens with a murder so brutal it effectively brings to an end decades of terrorism and guerrilla warfare between the IRA and British government forces. The year is 1997. The victim is an IRA bigwig. We readers are the only witnesses to the crime, and even though we don't know whodunit, or why, we do know something is amiss. Twenty years later--the novel's "real time"--the female chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, recalls it this way: "'There were all sorts of allegations about Miller's death, claims from one side or another about double-dealing and conspiracy. In the end, no one knew what to believe, other than that someone was stirring the shit in a big way. Some people even claimed the whole thing, from start to finish, was part of some sort of bizarre MI5 plot. And I must confess I wondered about that myself. Had the dirty tricks department been mixed up in it all somehow? I don't think we'll ever know."

Jack McCallan wants to know. He's at loose ends careerwise, recently recovered from combat wounds that let him retire from the army as a hero. He takes a beautiful married woman as his mistress and a makeshift job as gamesmaster at a spa for stressed-out executives. Then his father, Bill, put out to pasture from a high command post in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, is fried when his mobile home explodes, an accident that the new, improved Police Service attributes to alcohol-induced carelessness. As he settles his father's affairs and takes possession of the small fortune bequeathed him, Jack stumbles on bits of evidence that suggest Bill was keeping a guilty secret that may have led to his death. Jack resolves to follow the trail as it branches, leading both to present danger and betrayals concealed in the past.

Baker's plot twists and turns nicely, galloping along at a pace brisk enough to sweep up most any reader eager to be thrilled: heroes are revealed as villains, illusions as realities, allies are shown to be betrayers as the novel's stack of corpses mounts. A sense of Northern Ireland's war weariness and lingering paranoia hangs like ground fog over the 20-years-hence peace and prosperity that the author first posits, then threatens. His characters are mostly credible, and the scenario whereby political expediency and personal greed collaborate to create an economically desirable cease-fire is ingenious. Baker's political imagination outstrips his ability, or willingness, to create a technologically, socially, and intellectually believable future, though, leaving the reader feeling occasionally unmoored. --Joyce Thompson