By Thomas M. Egan
THE ANGEL TAPES, A Blade Macken Mystery, by David Kiely. St. Martin’s Press. $23.95, 280 pp.
David Kiely is a new Irish author in the field of mystery writing. Here, his talents show forth in this first of a projected series of police novels. They will center on his very “modern” hero – one Blade Macken, an Irish detective with many years of service many human faults as well.
The author teaches creative writing in Dublin while working on his fiction. He has already published a serious study of John Millington Synge and one novel as well. The locale for his new endeavor is his home city of Ireland’s capital. This shows in the pride and accuracy he shows for his setting, and the people and police work he describes with so much respect.
Alas, he is also a very up-to-date writer who puts all too obviously the techniques of social realism in his prose and morals. Blade Macken belongs to the Special Branch. He is middle-aged with all of the sorrows and none of the joys of maturity left to him. His mother has become mentally deranged with old age. He has served under the United Nations flags in police work in Cyprus and Palestine. He knows firsthand the senseless violence of terrorism and what it can do to people’s need for security and self-respect. He is more than a little of the literary anti-hero here. He drinks far too much, has a broken marriage, with both he and his wife unfaithful, and is separated from his two adolescent children.
The story holds in excitement and pacing. The characters in police work and the atmosphere they create are well-honed, even if the figures are none too likable. As a detective superintendent, Macken is thrust to the fore in facing a new terrorism in the Republic.
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The setting is the two-week period in July 1998 in Dublin as the president of the United States prepares another official state visit for the sake of international peace. The streets of Dublin are torn apart by a terrible explosion that kills six and injures dozens more. A terrorist “Angel” calls the police and seems to know both Macken and the top officialdom quite well indeed, as well as knowing both the necessary technology for the bombs and the streets of Dublin intimately. More bombs beneath the streets will now be set off – unless the police pay a ransom of some $25 million.
The police are stymied since the bombs seem to have been planted some five years earlier. The motive seems to be one of both deep revenge and a pure greed. “Angel” is devilishly clever; as a villain far more fascinating to peruse than any of the police characters. The mystery centers on Blade Macken’s past sexual escapades. He is in a sense responsible for Angel as a dark force of destruction. But he follows his clues, especially the voice tapes of the terrorist.