The Rage by Gene Kerrigan

First published in the UK in 2011; published by Europa on February 5, 2013 

Initially, two stories proceed on parallel paths in The Rage. The first focuses on Bob Tidey, a detective sergeant with the Dublin garda, as he investigates a murder. The other follows Vincent Naylor's robbery of a cash delivery service. By jumping frequently from one story to the other, Gene Kerrigan assures that something is always happening to hold the reader's interest. When Tidey's work is in its plodding stages, Naylor's crime is whizzing along, while the murder investigation gains steam after the robbery ends. The energy continues to shift from one story to the other throughout the course of the novel.

The murder: Emmet Sweetman, a corrupt banker, takes two bullets to the head and a shotgun blast to the chest. One of the bullets recovered from his corpse is tied to a gun used in the unsolved murder of Oliver Snead, a case Tidey investigated. Tidey is thus assigned to the team investigating Sweetman's murder. His investigation is hampered when his superiors seem content with a convenient solution, one that overlooks leads Tidey wants to pursue.

The robbery: Vincent Naylor, freshly released from prison, recruits his brother and two other men to steal cash from the equivalent of an armored car service. The heist is carefully planned but it goes wrong, making Naylor an angry man. During much of the novel's second half, Naylor is trying to channel his anger toward revenge without knowing who should be targeted.

Kerrigan takes care to establish his characters and set up his plot in the early chapters. Once the robbery commences and the murder investigation is underway, the pace quickens. The two storylines intersect at the novel's midway point, thanks to Tidey's friendship with a nun who witnessed the robbery's violent aftermath. The story is filled with mayhem (the novel lives up to its title), but violence never becomes a substitute for intelligent plotting and effective characterization. The final chapters pull everything together in a tense, refreshingly smart burst of storytelling.

Kerrigan has a realistic attitude about people who ordinarily occupy a position of respect. Tidey is critical of the garda officers he calls "little corporals," who live for the joy of forcing others to obey their petty commands, but he isn't eager to oppose them. Tidey isn't exactly Dirty Harry, but he doesn't always obey the law when it's more expedient to ignore it. One of Kerrigan's characters is a nun who was involved in a child abuse scandal. Yet Kerrigan doesn't demonize his characters, doesn't reduce them to one-dimensional caricatures. As Tidey tells the nun, "What you did, it's not all you are." Making a reader understand and even sympathize with characters who behave badly is a skill that many writers never develop. Kerrigan does it well.

The moral question that Tidey faces -- whether to disobey his superiors, who may be protecting well-placed individuals, in order to achieve a rough measure of justice -- is common in high quality police procedurals. The Rage might in that sense be formulaic, although Kerrigan takes the dilemma a step further, forcing Tidey to choose between two untenable outcomes. The phrases that begin and end the novel -- "There was no right thing to do. But something had to be done" -- encapsulate the novel's theme. Even if The Rage can be branded as formulaic, it couples the formula with tight prose, a steady pace, and a fair amount of suspense.

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