Blue Is the Night by Eoin McNamee review 'Haunting noirish ghost story'

Real-life unsolved murders haunt this story of madness and betrayal in 1950s Northern Ireland, the final instalment in Eoin McNamee's 'Blue trilogy'

"Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery." So says Judge Holden, the monstrous antagonist of Cormac McCarthy's seminal anti-western Blood Meridian . As Holden has it, man is a predator, his "civilisation" a bulwark erected to conceal a nature it can never truly subdue. We divide territories and build walls to convince ourselves the enemy lies beyond our gates. But the enemy is already always inside.

Just as McCarthy's work assumed the tattered genre apparel of the western to interrogate the founding myths of modern America, so McNamee (below) mobilises the tropes and conventions of the period crime novel in order to expose the marrow-deep, age-old enmities that will bring the divided society of 1950s Northern Ireland to the threshold of its own era of extendedly bloody transformation.