Fans of Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy mystery series, celebrate! The eighth installment, Hang on St. Christopher, is out, and it’s well worth the wait. My endless thanks go to NetGalley and Blackstone Publishing for the review copy. This book will be available to the American public tomorrow, March 4, 2025.

When we rejoin Duffy, he’s a part-timer with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, driving a desk:

Until a year ago, doing boring paperwork had only been my cover, because I’d really been a case officer in charge of handling an IRA double agent in the police, who we’d turned into a triple agent working for us: feeding the IRA false intelligence and trying to pick up tips. But the stress of playing for us and them had finally taken its toll on Assistant Chief Constable John Strong, who had a coronary event in his back garden, where he’d been pruning his pear tree with a chainsaw. The chainsaw had avoided killing him, but it had laid waste to several of his prized garden gnomes before the cutoff switch kicked in. It had taken him an hour to die out there, gasping for breath in the summer heat among the severed heads of his gnome army, and those of us who knew about his crimes and betrayals had considered that justice.

For the uninitiated, this is typical of McKinty’s writing style, providing essential information in a tightly worded space, but also including, now and then, some unexpectedly hilarious tidbits. It prevents his prose from becoming too dark to be a fun read.

And dark it does become. You see, Detective Sergeant Lawson, who was once Duffy’s underling and whom Duffy still outranks, is on vacation—sorry, holiday—on the Continent, and wouldn’t you know that a particularly interesting and urgent sort of murder takes place while he’s gone? Duffy is on his way out the door, ready to retire to his suburban home in Scotland where his girlfriend and daughter await, when he’s tapped to go to the scene. Of course, he can turn the whole thing over to Lawson once he’s home; it’s only for a couple of days.

As if.

There are two things that as a reader, I rarely do anymore, and one of them is to stay up late to finish a book. Why should I? I’m retired. I can finish it in the morning if I choose, when I’m rested. The other is to feel sorrow when a good book has ended. I always have dozens sitting in my queue, so even a good book that’s finished is a title I can check off my list, right? But just like Duffy’s tranquil—okay, boring—suburban idyll, all that goes out the window for this one. I stayed up long after my light is usually extinguished, and I mourned when I realized there was no more of it to read.

Once the adrenaline had faded, I wondered where my usual cynicism had gone. I’m a tough customer when it comes to mysteries, and in this one, Duffy does about a million things that cops never do in real life, taking all sorts of crazy risks, doing things at his own expense and on his own time. Why do I believe this story? Because I do. I believe every stinking word of it. And then I realize that it’s the character. McKinty has developed Sean Duffy so well that I know that while cops in general don’t do these things, Duffy absolutely does. Part of it is his thirst for justice; part of it is his inner darkness, a slight, or not so slight, death wish.

If I could change one thing, it would be to have the 9^th Sean Duffy mystery available now. Right this minute. I have some excellent books in my queue, but there’s not a single one that I wouldn’t drop like a hot coal if I were given another Duffy book.

Can you read it as a stand-alone? You can, but it would be silly, because when you finish, you’ll be online searching for ways to get the first seven in the series. Do what you gotta do, but read this book.