Brouhaha

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Ten years previous to this, Dove’s girlfriend Sandra Mohan (only 16 at the time) had gone missing and was never seen again, and an article by a journalist Joanne McCollum pointed to him as responsible, ruining his reputation. There is an interesting and varied cast of characters, all with favourable and negative characteristics - so more believable.

The only novel by a comedian that I remember as being something other than a cash-in was Steve Martin’s The Pleasure Of My Company, a weird, surrealism-inflected novel about a man who has finally won the “Most Average American” competition. In my case, until the first 20 per cent or so, I was reading on—not uninterested but also not gripped. I love getting signed copies of the new books, although it doesn’t always happen, but when it does, and its from someone you admire, its even better.Set during the initial stages of the peace process, we follow Dove's best (albeit estranged) friend Sharkey as he tries to piece together the events which lead up to his fleeing the town, as well as what tipped Dove over the edge to have done what he did.

Unfortunately, I did find that the storyline, although interesting and well written, was a bit too slow going for me and I did struggle with the pace of the story.We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

Needed 100 more pages to wrap up the ending without feeling like it was just a chase to stay under a word count. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.Both are intelligent, well read, yet have gotten into their share of trouble and also face the consequences of the unsolved disappearance.

The storyline moves between the events around the unsolved disappearance of teenager Sandra Mohan in 1994, and the impact of Sharkey, Kevin and Joanne's efforts to finally get to the truth following Dove's death - when all Tullyanna's dirty little secrets come spilling out. However a local journalist wrote an expose of life in the area and made conclusions about Sandra's disappearance. I would liken this to the writing of Caimh McDonnell - his novels portray Dublin in the same manner O'Hanlon describes the Irish boarder region. At its heart, this is a darned good murder mystery and I loved the way the trio of investigators go about tracking down the clues in their own special ways.

There is a fair bit of violence and abuse in the book, and while not gratuitous (or horribly graphic), it is something I can usually do without. They include an influential local politician who used to be the local bully, a retired policeman turned soccer coach and a folksy doctor who drives like a maniac. If you're up for something a little different that challenges your idea of what a dark comedy can achieve in terms of literary weight, then I bring you Brouhaha! Give him his dues, there is one joke in the book very much in that style – about the Guess the Age of the Hen competition – that made me damn near lose my cup of tea. Brouhaha is an edgy dark comedy, which does for Crime fiction what Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy, did for science fiction and space exploration.