![]() ![]() Jess Kidd’s familiarity with the landscape and dialect is evident in her writing.Įlevating the troupe is the ancient former actress, Mrs Cauley, a self-styled "Miss Marple with balls" whose love of mysteries niftily results in a whodunnit escapade that will centre on a production of Synge's play. ![]() The Erris peninsula near Belmullet in Co Mayo. ![]() Loquacious publican Tadgh, the puritan Widow Farelly, upstanding sergeant Jack Brophy, and weasel-like parish priest Fr Quinn make up a colourful if somewhat cliched cast. All he has to go on is a photo of himself as a baby – and a note warning him not to trust anybody in Mulderrig.Ī tongue-in-cheek tone initially brings a lightness to proceedings, with characters introduced as speedily and vividly as an Agatha Christie mystery. The novel then alternates between beautiful Orla’s murder and the adult orphan, Mahony, journeying to Mulderrig 20 years later. Citing as its inspirations Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood and JM Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, Himself sets itself up as a tale of violence and death in an insular, close-knit community where any of the inhabitants could be a suspect.Ī gripping prologue in the style of a Grimm’s fairytale sees a baby abandoned in a forest after his outcast teenage mother is brutally murdered in 1956. ![]() Poisoned scones, letter bombs, a hero who sees dead people and a 1970s Irish village desperate to maintain its pious facade: the ingredients for mystery and drama are all present early in Jess Kidd's debut novel. ![]()
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