Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

The lids closed on those big emerald eyes.

Opened again.

She produced a gun, Scotchy’s gun.

She set it on the sofa.

I looked at Bridget and I looked at the gun. Neither of us moved. Then Bridget reached in her coat again and found the thing she’d really been searching for: a brush. She began taking the knots out of Siobhan’s hair. She tried to say something, coughed. Her throat was hoarse from crying and she couldn’t speak, but her head bobbed the affirmative, and finally, in that husky, tired New York whisper, she said simply:

“Yes.”

Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, at the height of the Troubles. He studied politics at Oxford University and after a failed law career he moved to New York City in the early 1990s. He found work as a security guard, postman, door-to-door salesman, construction worker, barman, rugby coach, book-store clerk and librarian. Having lived in Colorado for many years with his wife and daughters, he and his family have moved to Melbourne, Australia.

In addition to The Bloomsday Dead, Serpent’s Tail publishes the other two volumes in Adrian McKinty’s The Dead Trilogy – Dead I Well May Be and The Dead Yard, as well as Fifty Grand and Hidden River.