Amazon.com: Dead I Well May Be: A Novel: Adrian McKinty: Books

From Publishers Weekly
McKinty's second novel is a brutal tale of revenge starring a young illegal immigrant from Ireland who chooses a criminal career in New York over unemployment in Belfast. Arriving in the city in the early 1990s, the antihero Michael Forsythe lands a spot as an enforcer for Irish mobster Darkey White. Though Forsythe at first keeps his hands relatively clean, he soon racks up a significant number of kills in skirmishes with rival crews as well as with Dominican gangs warring for control of the streets. An affair with his boss's girlfriend leads to a setup: he and his mates are trapped in a drug sting in Mexico and abandoned in a remote prison. "If someone grows up in the civil war of Belfast in the seventies and eighties, perhaps violence is his only form of meaningful expression," McKinty writes early in the novel, and the bulk of the story recounts Forsythe's grisly efforts to escape and avenge himself, including a stint with a Dominican group seeking to oust Darkey White. The pace is brisk and energetic, but Forsythe remains a cipher-a self-educated intellectual who listens to Tolstoy on tape during a stakeout but exhibits puzzlingly little interest in finding an alternative to the gun and the knife. The dark, brooding tone is reminiscent of Dennis Lehane, but McKinty has yet to achieve Lehane's depth and complexity.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Michael Forsythe, another mick who can't get no satisfaction, leaves depressed Northern Ireland for New York City at 19, set to work construction for an Irish mobster until he earns back plane fare. Instead, he's assigned to the shady side of the business as low-rent muscle. It's 1992, a dangerous time in Harlem, with Dominican gangs testing Irish turf. It's even dicier for Michael, a book-smart dreamer who's fallen for the boss' girl. Standard stuff, yes, but explosive in McKinty's expert hands. A literate, funny, wise old soul in the body of a dangerously naive teen, his Michael draws us close and relates a fantastic tale of murder and revenge in low, wry tones, as if from the next barstool. He's doing the voices as he goes--no quotation marks necessary, mate--and keeps dropping big, bloody hints about future twists. The dark revelations only get listeners leaning in closer, desperate to hear what happens next even while longing for the story to go on forever. As Michael and his crew muddle through horrifying mishaps--maiming the wrong guy here, getting lost in a Mexican prison there--he drops out of conversational mode to throw in a few breathtaking fever-dream sequences for flavor. And then he springs an ending so right and satisfying it leaves us numb with delight and ready to pop for another round. Start the cliche machine: This is a profoundly satisfying book from a major new talent--and one of the best crime fiction debuts of the year. Frank Sennett
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Dead I Well May Be: A Novel (Hardcover)

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