Customer Reviews

Winterland

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Two shocking deaths are the catalyst for Glynn's riveting thriller. A small-time drug dealer with a big ego, Noel Rafferty, is gunned down in a local beer garden; hours later, his uncle, also Noel Rafferty, is killed in a car accident. The Rafferty family is reeling from the double tragedy, but none is more distressed than Gina Rafferty, aunt of one, sister to the other. Gina cannot accept the supposed coincidence of the deaths, especially after the last words her brother spoke to her the night before. Riddled with questions, she investigates on her own, a David in search of Goliath, a young woman with no power or resources, but plenty of courage. Although she has no proof, Gina's instincts lead her to the halls of power and men she has revered, all of whom have feet of clay.

They say politics makes strange bedfellows and a recent deal brokered in London is no exception. A new skyscraper complex, Richmond Plaza, has attracted funding from an American equity firm, thanks to the careful shepherding of property developer Paddy Norton and endorsed by soon-to-be Prime Minister Larry Bolger. Norton and Bolger have a long working history, as well as ties to Gina's brother, the now-deceased Noel Rafferty. Unfortunately, Gina's questions pose a threat to the Richmond project, to Paddy's grand plans and possibly to Bolger's future as Taoisech (prime minister). When Gina contacts Mark Griffin, a young man deeply affected by a family tragedy in his childhood, the dark secrets of the past are unleashed to the detriment of the power brokers, politicians and investors in Richmond Plaza.

Glynn's plot never lets up, from the two deaths at the beginning of the story to a shocking example of gangland violence in a confrontation in a warehouse, from the accident that took the lives of Griffin's family to a stand-off in the glass-walled Richmond Plaza, where Gina holds a gun as the SWAT team gathers. Dreams of power and fortune are run aground in a drug-fueled haze of one greedy man, while another faces the consequences of his family's activities on his behalf. Dublin is on the cusp of greatness with its new complex until Gina takes aim and brings the pretenders to their knees. Prescient in his choice of topic, Glynn has written a stunning modern thriller that addresses the moral ambiguities of the times and the acquisitive ambitions of the wealthy. Luan Gaines/2010.

Winterland is one amazing book and may slip by readers since most have never heard of the author. But don't miss this one because it is a thrill ride.
Combining murder, politics, technology and economic back dealing, Glynn sets up an premise that begins with a murder, proceeds to a death in a auto accident and then builds to a captivating plot that is bound to capture your attention.
The leads in this story are not detectives, secret agents, lawyers, private investigators or some sort of Six Million Dollar man who can solve anything with gun play or martial art moves.
Gina Rafferty and Mark Griffin are two ordinary people who get caught up in a labyrinth conspiracy by powerful people involved in the complex politics and back room dirty tricks of modern day Ireland and specifically Dublin. Both have had tragedy occur to them involving members of their family and both feel there is much more to the story than meets the eye. And the villains in this book are equally fascinating, evil and yet very vulnerable.
Glynn sets up the cast of his thrilling crime novel and their various motivations clearly yet not completely until the end of the novel. He has some set pieces, one on the top of a building under construction, one in a warehouse and one in a hospital which would on their own make for phenomenal episodes of "24". During these moments, you will be turning the pages with excitement to find out how they turn out and believe me surprises await! The last pages are as intense as the previous 300.
What is going on with the brand new high rise being built near the docklands of Dublin? What is in store for the Irish minister who craves power and is willing to do anything to reach the top of Irish government? What happened years earlier in a tragic auto accident and how does that tie into another mysterious crash that occurred years later? Why did two people with the same name in the same family die within hours of each other?
I had a hard time putting down this book because Glynn never lets up on the mystery or the tension. Pick it up and you like I will be on the waiting list for the next Glynn novel.

In a pub in Dublin, someone guns down minor league drug dealer Noel Rafferty. Later that same night his uncle with the identical name dies in a strange car accident. The police proclaim the first death as a gangland homicide and the second as a coincidental accident.

Gina Rafferty rejects the police summation while the cops and most of the family reject her belief that someone sinister is getting away with a double murder. She is ignored because she grieves for her nephew and her brother. Mourning but outraged, Gina investigates the connections between her two dead relatives besides DNA and death. She knew her brother worked on the Richmond Plaza project with avaricious developer Paddy Norton, who has connections with avaricious politician Larry Bolger. Gina is convinced these two powerful greedy partners are behind the deaths in her family and sets out to find the proof.

The key to this terrific Irish Noir is the cast including the city is super solid as the key players come across genuine at a time the Irish economy is in the toilet and about to be flushed to sea. Gina is obstinate and courageous yet treated like a grieving dolt so even as the cops, family, the villains and others warn her to stop her inquiry they treat her as a harmless idiot until the realization she is closing in on the truth. Winterland is a super amateur sleuth as the truth may free you but not in this case.

Harriet Klausner

After reading Alan Glynn's revolutionary "Limitless" I was prepared from a great read from a great writer. I was disappointed. The author kills the tension from the beginning by revealing the mystery of why the "two Noels" were murdered, then it just becomes the tedious business of the older Noel's heroic sister relentlessly tracking down the bad guy. Its particularly annoying when the reader already knows the solution to the mystery the protagonist is investigating. Nor did I get any strong sense of Ireland during its bubble period like the author evoked for turn of the millennium Manhattan in Limitless. Overall it was worth reading but just barely. It makes me wonder if maybe Glynn actually wrote Winterland before Limitless and then got it published after the movie made his reputation.

Dustjacket: Of course, I say Winterland instead of Winteßland, the way it appears in the title on the dustjacket of the first American edition. I especially like the picture on this edition of the novel, the high cranes looming over the garden wall, the garden in the near-ground bearing the implications of mythical Eden.

The dustjacket gives credit for the photo to Maria Buckley (credit for the design goes to David Rutstein and Keith Hayes), and apparently Buckley's Flicker page is at this link. I've had this novel for some time, marked as a winter read for January due to its title, but the winterland in here is the name of a corporate entity, the name meant to resonate with its cold, calculated materialism and with the generally dismal atmosphere that corporate globalism has fostered.

The opening line of the prologue is: "How has it come to this?" On down the first page the desolate "this" is described as "the eerie and soulless feel of a virtual environment."

The opening line of the first chapter is: "He is sitting in what they now call the beer garden."

The nice choice of a dustjacket here resonates with the garden part of beer garden. The beer resonates with human addictions--to alcohol, yes, but also to money, power, drugs, guns, and lots of other things. Addictions "ß" us.

On the surface level, the book works wonderfully both as a thriller and as an indictment of the way corporate power works to manipulate government and law enforcement. The pacing is very deliberate, but in this novel, that's a good thing. It unfolds piece by piece, cause then effect.

The first chapter: The first Noel, bystanders did say, was a mean, fat, rotten piece of slime. Still, he was a child of God in the Cormac McCarthy sense. We see this Noel bullying an old man by the name of Christy. A hit man in a ski mask appears suddenly and guns Noel down, then quickly escapes over the beer garden wall. It turns out that, beyond this one scene, Christy is not a character in the novel at all; so we might wonder, what is his purpose in the novel?

Seems to me, Christy appears as an everyman christ--certainly not as Christ, but only in the everyman small letter sense. In this novel, to the right eyes, everyman's a christ, everyman's a Noel. Though I doubt that many see it that way.

The main protagonist is Gina, related to both murdered Noels, a good modern woman with plenty of true grit and a desire to solve the mysteries in here. But will she let the cycle of revenge consume her, or will she wise up and step out of the destructive pattern she is in?

That's the question suggested by the prologue, though I prefer the way it is presented in a small paragrah later in the novel:

"It is only now that Gina is beginning to see how she herself is one of these others, how Norton is like a virus she has contracted, or a toxic substance in her system she may never be able to eliminate. With each step, it becomes a little clearer. . .how he has influenced her behavior, twisted her emotions, choked her sense of who she is. . .how he has turned her into this crazy lady, the mad bitch who can't be stopped."

By this time, we know that the "R" standing out on the dustjacket must stand for revenge--to which she has become addicted--and we're hoping Gina can turn it around.

I'm giving this novel five stars. Highly recommended.

In this powerhouse example of the very best Irish noir, Alan Glynn exposes the venality that sometimes drives politicians, builders, contractors, and power brokers to abandon any pretense of morality and act solely in their own best interests. Everyone has an "angle" here, even those who are supposedly on the side of "right," and violence is not only possible but likely whenever someone is threatened. Dramatic, smart, action-filled, and slyly understated in its literary style, this novel is a can't-put-it-downer of the first order.

When Sean Rafferty, a pasty-faced twenty-six-year-old with a link to drug gangs, is murdered, his aunt Gina, a young businesswoman, is shocked. But when in less than twenty-four hours, her uncle, Sean Rafferty, also dies in what is assumed to be a driving accident, she is horrified. Noel, the elder, is a partner in a structural engineering firm working on the 48-story Richmond Plaza development, which will be one of the tallest buildings in Europe. There he works with the developer, his security expert, and the Minister for Enterprise, Trade, and Employment, thought to be a shoo-in for the next prime minister of the country. Before long, the reader, like Gina, suspects that there was an error, and that the wrong Sean Rafferty was killed the first time.

Another, very similar car accident more than twenty years ago, involved the minister's brother, except that in this crash three innocent people in one family died, leaving a five-year-old boy an orphan. Gina Rafferty, determined to find out how and why her brother Sean was killed, soon makes contact with the only survivor of that earlier accident, Mark Griffin, and together they begin to look into the two car accidents that claimed their family members and the history of the Richmond Plaza development. The body count rises, and Gina and Mark find themselves threatened. The dark reality of this building project always looms in the foreground as the whole structure of the government and its lucrative private relationships with builders and contractors come under scrutiny.

Throughout the novel, Alan Glynn roots both his prose and his plot in the realistic, the natural, making the action a plausible outgrowth of circumstances, instead of a dramatic melodrama. His simple metaphors and similes establish a scene without overwhelming it, and he keeps the reader constantly entertained, as his pacing and revelation of new information gradually increase the complexity of the plot. Most information comes from the action and the spot-on dialogue related to it--earthy, profane, and casual--and in this respect the style resembles the best of theatre. The "good" characters here-Gina and Mark-are less naïve and more grounded than in most similar mystery-thrillers, and though Mark Griffin is the moral compass of the novel, neither he nor Gina is above resorting to violence in order to protect their investigation or their own interests. As the dark reality of the Richmond Plaza building project evolves, the reader becomes convinced, as never before, that morality is always relative--at least in the Dublin that Alan Glynn depicts here. Mary Whipple

The Dark Fields

All of Dublin is excited about the construction of its first skyscraper, Richmond Plaza, especially billionaire land developer Paddy Norton who is the owner of Winterland Properties. He is good friends with Larry Bolger, Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment who is his Party's shoe in for prime minister. Norton's associate, Noel Rafferty, a structural engineer working on the Richmond Plaza, is killed when his car crashes into a ravine. Noel's sister Gina doesn't believe his death was an accident. Somehow, it is related to the gangland murder of her drug dealing nephew who was also named Noel Rafferty. As Gina investigates her brother's death, she learns that it is tied in with a similar car accident that occurred twenty-five years ago and killed Larry Bolger's brother, Frank. Torture, murder and mayhem ensue as Gina's investigation brings her closer to the shocking truth.

Alan Glynn's "Winterland" is a soap opera-like crime drama that is brimming with action, suspense and mystery. However, the violence is very low key. There is a torture scene, but it is implicit rather than explicit. Only the aftermath is described. Foul language is kept to a minimum and there is surprisingly no sex. What I loved most about this novel is the excellent characterization. There is a wide assortment of believable characters from various socio economic backgrounds. The reader will find some admirable and some despicable. There is the slimy young drug lord, Terry Stack, who tortures his victims with electrical cables, and the elderly, affable James Vaughan who once worked for John Kennedy and is providing much of the financing for the Richmond Plaza.

My favorite character, and the reason why I adore "Winterland," is Gina Rafferty, co-owner of Lucius Software. Independent, energetic, tenacious and brave, she refuses to accept her brother's car accident at face value. On several occasions, this feisty, attractive software developer risks her life in order to discover the truth and avenge the deaths of her relatives. She is one of my favorite mystery novel heroines. (Another favorite of mine is Bess Crawford of Charles Todd's "A Duty to the Dead.") Gina is aided by her brother's friend, Detective Superintendent Jackie Merrigan, and Mark Griffin who was a little boy when his family was slaughtered in the same car accident that killed politician Frank Bolger. There is an inkling of romance between Gina and Mark; unfortunately, it never reaches fruition because Mark spends a great deal of time in the hospital, leaving Gina at the mercy of thugs.

If Gina Rafferty is the protagonist, then wealthy Paddy Norton is definitely the antagonist or villain. Greedy, egotistical and conniving, his evilness is never fully comprehended by the reader until the novel's closing pages. He will kill anyone who tries to prevent the construction of the controversial Richmond Plaza, which will serve as the crowning achievement of his career. Addicted to pain killers, he suffers from anxiety attacks. The guilt of his past sins weighs heavily on his nerves. For twenty-five years, he's tried to suppress the events that surrounded the suspicious car accident that killed Frank. Now, history has repeated itself and the horror has returned in such a magnitude that even the strongest pills won't assuage it.

The plot for "Winterland" appears to have been ripped from today's headlines. There is always a scandal involving a politician who's been having an affair or inappropriately using funds. Larry Bolger is one such politician. Furthermore, land is scarce. Unable to expand outward, many cities are expanding upward. Building skyscrapers is very trendy. It's the new frontier. Thanks to a global economy, numerous countries invest in the building of a single skyscraper. In "Winterland," Ray Sullivan is an American CEO for Amcan, the anchor company for Richmond Plaza. Also, global warming and the extreme weather that it can create plays a significant factor in this complex, plausible crime drama.

"Winterland" is a must read for fans of Irish noir and crime drama in general. Readers will be praying and hoping that Gina Rafferty will succeed in bringing her brother's murderers to justice. Alan Glynn is also the author of "Dark Fields," which will soon be released as a film from Universal. It is the story of a Manhattan copywriter, Eddie Spinola, who becomes quickly, and hopelessly, addicted to a powerful new drug, MDT-48, which increases intelligence. Eddie's character reminds me of Paddy Norton in "Winterland"; he was addicted to pain killers. If you like Irish noir, then I highly recommend Stuart Neville's "The Ghosts of Belfast" in which Gerry Fegan, former hit man for the IRA, must assassinate those responsible for murdering the innocent souls that haunt him.

Note: I have 20/20 vision but I found the print for "Winterland" to be very tiny. After reading about ten to fifteen pages, I found my eyes growing extremely tired and my vision blurring. I had to use a magnifying glass in order to read it comfortably. I've never had this problem with any other novels published by Minotaur. The reader may want to investigate the size of the print before purchasing.


Joseph B. Hoyos

Two men with the same first name, Noel die on the same night. Is this just a bizarre coincidence or is there some connection to these two men's deaths? Both men died in different ways.

The first was Noel Rafferty, who was part of a Dublin gang. He was known as "Grassy Noel" because he enjoyed partaking in smoking marijuana over hash. Grassy Noel was one of the top lieutenants in the gang.

The other Noel was also from the Rafferty family. He was the older Mr. Rafferty. His death was being ruled as a tragic accident.

No one believes the two deaths are connected. The only person who does is Gina Rafferty. She will stop at nothing to get justice for her family.

Winterland by Alan Glynn is the first book I have read by this author. I thought it was pretty good. It started out alright but lost some steam throughout parts of the books. Though, the ending was good. The only person I really found of interest was Gina. When she wasn't in the scenes than I didn't really pay attention to what was transpiring between the other characters. What made Gina appealing to me was her drive and determination to uncover the truth behind the deaths of her family members. Overall, Winterland is a pretty good novel worth giving it a try.

As one reviewer already noted any mystery or tension in the plot is killed off right at the beginning of the book as the primary bad guy is revealed within the first fifty or so pages. The rest is then left to be a middling thriller; I say middling because most of the book is not particularly thrilling. The few interesting bits and pieces do keep the plot moving along to an anti-climactic conclusion.

Quick Review. I'm seeing the word "noir" used alot in the descriptions, but don't think of Hollywood film noir when you read the term in connection with this book.

It does have those elements, and it does get gritty, but the plot, the characters, and the writing rise much higher. This novel is very intelligent and refined.

It is set in Ireland, but don't let that create even the slightest doubt as to whether that would affect your interest. The story is very current, and reads just as if it occurred in New York or Miami or Chicago....no difference.

The plot is excellent and advances nicely, and the writing is natural and concise. It is extremely well-written and it never got bogged down in wordy, awkward, or pointless prose. It is an "easy" read, which is important to me because I am neither a fast, nor patient, reader.

An intelligent and enjoyable read.