It is rare that a new novel’s content lives up to the blurb on the jacket: “a must-read for any true crime fan”, we are told here, but in this case it is all that, and more!
No reader of Newry Journal can possibly be in any doubt as to the editor’s fixation with the terrible murder of beautiful young Pearl Gamble some fifty years ago and just further along the Upper Damolly Road from where my present home is located.
Patrick Greg has written a thriller: It is fast-paced, accurate, intruiging and utterly absorbing. I have done little else these past few days but try to ingest the wealth of new facts, so diligently researched by this marvellous writer. More, he does not hesitate to criticise those who fell short of the demands of their job, even his fellow police officers who in their naivete committed a few elementary errors in the investigation.
As an added bonus, Greg treats us to potted histories (as relevant and in just enough detail) of such as Crumlin Road jail and the executions which took place there – and of the absorbing case of the terrible murder of Patricia Curran that transfixed social life here a generation before Pearl Gamble’s quite similar murder.
Had I been responsible for this book, I’d be as proud as Punch.
Buy it!
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Should ‘Patrick Greg’ read this critique, I’d be grateful if he would contact me on this site – so that I might congratulate him personally – even, perhaps share a pint and an hour’s chat about some loose ends I’d like cleared up.
‘Contact Us’ comes directly to me, the Editor!