Pat Gray Books

A chilling noir novel set in the Belfast of The Troubles in which Pat Gray introduces us to the flawed but dogged and honourable policeman McCann. It is a welcome return to fiction after an eighteen year silence by one of Ulster's finest novelists. Eight years in C Division was a long stretch for any man to be in one of the worst posts. That would break the toughest fellow. That would make you wonder if McCann was really the man for the job. Inspector McCann is called to investigate the brutal murder of a teenage girl, at first assuming it is a sex crime or sectarian tit-for-tat killing. But another girl is killed and then his prime suspect castrated and murdered. He finds himself trapped in vicious old rivalries, unsupported and alone. Are the murders connected to 'Dirty Tricks' by the combatants in Ireland's war, or has McCann lost the plot, as his boss suggests? Following the success of The Political Map of the Heart, Pat Gray's second Belfast novel is detective fiction that is bloodier and darker than anything he has previously written.

Pat Gray's Kafkaesque fantasy presents a bureaucratic landscape which is both sinister and comic. Mr Narrator leads an obscure neo-colonial existence in Goughly, where he is an export agent for a firm of Rotherham engineers and shares a flat and a mistress with Murphy, a post-modernist writer. An upset to one of his business deals plunges him into a bizarre cross-desert journey to the capital, where, social, political and sexual humiliation descend on him in ever increasing number. Pat Gray's novel portrays with documentary accuracy a Morocco which has never existed but one which has now been colonised by surrealism