Kept guessing until the last page
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Review
Kiss the Bullet
by Catherine Deveney (Old Street) £12.99
COULD you fall in love with the man who killed your family?
As intriguing tag lines go, that’s up there with the best of them and, happily, Deveney’s page-turner of a novel — which centres on Danni, a woman whose husband and three-year-old son were killed by an IRA bomb in Glasgow 18 years ago — doesn’t disappoint.
The Black Isle-based author is perhaps best known for her award-winning feature writing in Scotland on Sunday. Some instructive reader notes at the end of the novel help place her fascination with Ireland — though she makes very clear it wasn’t always that way. Growing up a Catholic in Glasgow, it was to her a "frightening place" seen on the news when bombs went off.
It wasn’t somewhere she wanted to go, having grown up in a city where religious tribalism was part of the landscape. But her work was in later years to take her to Ireland where she interviewed figures as diverse and politically opposed as Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley Junior. She was also to marry a man with strong Irish connections, going on to become smitten with Donegal and Dublin.
Haunted by the past and still burning with bitterness and anger years after the tragedy, Danni, who in the story is also a journalist, makes the fateful decision to travel to Belfast in a bid to confront whoever was behind the bombing and seek her revenge.
The motivation for such a trip is convincingly and movingly explored in such a way that will ring true to anyone who has lost a loved one. Danni comes face to face with the sinister underworld figure of Pearson who in turn brings her into contact with the enigmatic Johnny — and one very big step closer to a confrontation with her own demons.
The murder of a prostitute with whom she had made fleeting contact shortly after arrival brings her into contact with Stella, a young woman who is also on the game and battling addiction.
Deveney’s real life interviews and first-hand exploration of the issues at the heart of the troubles have clearly informed to a great extent the compelling yarn she weaves here.
The author has a huge credibility gap to bridge in driving the reader towards some sort of understanding of the central theme of the book. It is to her great credit that she pulls it off. It’s one of those rare reads that truly does keep you guessing until the very last page.
Day job insight paves way for gripping thriller
IN answering the question as to how she reconciles her fiction and journalism, Deveney says, "I don’t think I could have become a novelist if I hadn’t been a journalist first. I have been exposed to so many people and situations that I simply wouldn’t have encountered if I had stayed in my original job as an English teacher.
"I have interviewed families who have lost a loved one to murder, but I have also interviewed a murderer, and that gives you an insight it’s hard to get anywhere else. A lot of my interviews now are with celebrities, but often I prefer interviewing ordinary people with extraordinary stories. You learn so much about human nature."
The author admits that while it’s easy to become dispirited about the terrible things human beings are capable of, she believes that "the heights of people’s capacity for love and generosity can be every bit as extraordinary as the depths of their capacity for evil".
She says, "I’ve come to believe that what matters in life are those moments where you achieve real empathy... with another person. A moment where your guard can come down in some way. I try to capture some of those moments in my fiction."
