Brouhaha

Product Information

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 sentence construction seemed odd at times, mainly because he has the habit of letting his brain wander off. Brouhaha certainly made for an interesting reading experience—it is a slower moving (but cleverly done) book, and written in a style that (like other reviewers too have mentioned) took me a while to get into. Throughout the novel I often found myself smiling wryly at the quirkiness of it all, even in the bleakest of moments, and this somehow lightens the whole piece even though the storyline is filled with poignancy.

The quotations and references - Springsteen to Yeats - add a lovely depth to this fine piece of work. Sharkey is not really sure why he is here, but a strange message he recently received from the broken and drug-addicted Dove about Sandra gives him the feeling that the time has come to confront what really happened to her. The plotting was noticeably first rate, with droplets of information into proceedings and then tidied up efficiently later on in the story. If you have ever sat in front of a peat fire in an Irish country pub, nursing a pint of Guinness or perhaps a glass of Jameson’s, listening to the resident shanachie weaving a magical spell with a long, meandering and enthralling tale from local folklore, you will have an idea of what reading this book is like.

Having got through the first ten percent of the book, it felt as if I should be at least a quarter of the way through.

This has the bones of a cracking literary thriller with heavyweight crime story credentials, but it also has a surreal quality to it in the way the very darkest kind of humour ties everything together.

The residents are full of life, with characters ranging from a corrupt local politician, and a retired Garda who coaches GAA.