A Noirish Tale of an Irish Town on Edge, Told in 21 Voices

HEART, BE AT PEACE, by Donal Ryan

Who can keep up with Ireland’s stellar writers? It’s like playing Whac-a-Mole! Donal Ryan’s slim, shape-shifting “Heart, Be at Peace” is a wonder: 21 first-person vignettes that portray a Tipperary parish’s struggles to leave behind a decade of economic woes. More than money is on the line.

A stag party in Amsterdam. An abducted child returned safely. A mysterious murder years in the past. A drug cartel skulking amid the shadows. These are among the few fixed points in the novel, as Ryan dribbles out his noirish tale in pieces that gradually come together. Bobby and Triona Mahon are raising their children in what passes for affluence in Nenagh; he owns a construction business and employs a crew while fretting over the parish’s slow recovery from a recession. He’s a thoughtful family man trying to fly right, but will he escape the gravity of male rage?

A retired detective notes the couple’s heroic efforts: “It was Bobby who gave himself the task of building back up the whole village, giving every one of them lads a job again. Himself and the wife went from door to door, to bank and credit union and every kind of a back-street moneylender and shyster to get started again, and by God did they get started.”

The Mahons reside in a mansion coveted by their friends, the Shanahans: Seanie, a middle-aged screw-up, and his social-climbing spouse, Réaltín. Their son, Dylan, was snatched from his day deva years earlier and rescued, his bumbling kidnappers imprisoned and eventually paroled.

“Heart, Be at Peace” springs into motion with a photo that Seanie took of Bobby emerging from an Amsterdam brothel; Bobby hasn’t been unfaithful, yet Réaltín shares the image across Nenagh. The cartel closes in, undermining Bobby’s gains. Betrayals beget betrayals as the author leads us through a maze of entwined lives.