Brouhaha

Product Information

of cruelty ("sorry for your trouble, Ma'am") and a smart journalist and an emasculated policeman discarded in the village ditch as the riviting plot unfolds in a series of chapters that are as taut as Pulp Fiction. A clue to the mystery is hidden in a graphic novel created by Dove, who was a talented artist and Sandra’s wannabe boyfriend.

But Dove has left a graphic novel – derivative it seems of Pat Mills Sláine – that with all its casual misogyny might have secret clues as to the crime.The female characters seem aggressively overwritten, and the comedic passages are shadowed by the violence. Now no longer in the force, he continues to go over what he knows (often reciting facts and possibilities to his infant grandson, Paul), still wanting to work it out. 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.

Showing a shocking assertiveness for possibly the first time in his life, and the last, says you, Dove blew the lid off the whole town. 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.

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. The secondary characters are fully-padded and all have a role to play (even if I did sometimes mix them up because they had nicknames as well as their given names). 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. Maybe together they can break through the web of lies that has built up around Sandra's disappearance and finally get to the truth? This was a struggle from the beginning up to the point where I collapsed from exhaustion and skipped to the end.

Needed 100 more pages to wrap up the ending without feeling like it was just a chase to stay under a word count.No doubt O’Hanlon’s publisher would like it to be compared to Paul Murray and Colin Bateman, but Brouhaha would probably never have been published were it not for O’Hanlon’s status. His storytelling is punctuated with satirical references to Irish history, popular culture and mythology. 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. Kevin Healy is a rather likeable character, but he too, has been through much, including a bout of mental trouble after having been shot when he was a Garda, and Sandra’s case continues to weigh on him, something he is determined to solve.