The New York Times Book Review - Marilyn Stasio
…remarkable…At once a close character study and a sweeping panorama of the era of "dissectionists" who buy bodies for medical research and the "resurrectionists" who dig them up, this fascinating book is a stirring work of fiction and a perceptive chapter in Ireland's social history.
Robert Goddard
Compelling and eerily authentic. Read it and be grateful to be alive in our day and age.
Irish Mail on Sunday
Extraordinarily detailed world, impeccably researched. So superbly written that it soars as a masterly work of fiction. Utterly compelling.
Marilyn Stasio - The New York Times Book Review
A
remarkable first novel. At once a close character study and a sweeping panorama of 'dissectionists' who buy bodies for medical research and the 'resurrectionists' who dig them up, this fascinating book is a stirring work of fiction and a perceptive chapter in Ireland’s social history.
Pittsburg Post-Gazette
Just about everything pays off in this engrossing 'Crime and Punishment' style tale.
Fascinating. The novel is mean and wicked and really well done.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
An engrossing historical mystery. Gallows humor and Dickensian details permeate Hughes’ debut, one that takes readers to the dark heart of a series of real crimes in Victorian Dublin.
Charles Palliser
Unputdownable. Chillingly portrayed. A highly sophisticated first novel.
C. J. Sansom
A quite exceptional novel. The world he creates has echoes of Kafka and Orwell. Totally convincing. It draws you in like a trap.
Criminal Element
Fascinating.
A
mesmerizing, utterly convincing, utterly sympathetic tale of life in Victorian
Dublin. A realistic, complex tale that raises important, topical questions about society, government and morality. And the writing itself is really quite terrific. An exceptional historical mystery.
Bookreporter
Andrew
Hughes has created an eerily authentic world where one’s neighbors cannot be trusted and the authorities even less. John’s rapid decline from aimless student to cold-blooded killer is not only chilling, but sophisticated in its telling.
Superb.
Booklist
There is a dark resignation to Delahunt’s tale and at times an almost manic, Sweeney Todd–like urgency. Recommend this atmospheric historical fiction to fans of John Banville or Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996).
Booklist
There is a dark resignation to Delahunt’s tale and at times an almost manic, Sweeney Todd–like urgency. Recommend this atmospheric historical fiction to fans of John Banville or Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996).
Irish Independent
Reminiscent of John Banville's The Book of Evidence. A bracing, lurid tale that is as engrossing as it is chilling.”
Kirkus Reviews
2015-04-02
Debut novelist Hughes imagines the circumstances leading up to the Victorian-era real-life hanging of John Delahunt, a convicted Irish child-murderer. Trinity College education near complete, Delahunt anticipated launching himself into 1840s Dublin society as a gentleman. Then his father died. Delahunt soon learned the estate was mortgaged to pay for his father's care. That was an inopportune time to meet Thomas Sibthorpe, who works for the shadowy "Department" at the Castle, headquarters of Dublin's police. Transpiring thereafter is an intense character study, one in which Delahunt's life becomes Hobbesian—nasty, brutish, and short. He accepts money from Sibthorpe to give false testimony about a street fight in which a constable was injured. Delahunt sees an opportunity for more easy money, necessary because he's wooing Helen, a young woman of substance. Delahunt approaches her father for permission to marry. It's granted, then rescinded once the father discovers Delahunt's proclivities. The couple elopes. Helen is rejected by her family. The pair lands in a decrepit apartment. Delahunt later witnesses an assault, but there's more money in witnessing murder. Delahunt, psychopathic and greedy, kills the wounded man. His testimony leads to an innocent being hanged. Helen's the more ambiguous character. Although ignorant of the murder, she acquiesced to perjury for money. Then she descends into laudanum addiction following a botched abortion, and the marriage collapses, as does Delahunt. There's much that is cringe-inducing as these less-than-admirable characters skulk through the cold, rain-drenched streets of Victorian Dublin. "Lyster had begun to use my fork to clean the grime from beneath his fingernails," Delahunt notes when a Sibthorpe cohort visits his apartment, a fitting observation of character in this tragedy, which is morbid reading on every page. A Kafkaesque study of an amoral weakling consumed by an unrestrained bureaucracy.
