In "post-terrorist" Belfast, the old hatreds continue to fester, and the politics remain deeply personal. Anyone, at any moment, may decide the war's not yet over.
When his wife catches Belfast journalist Dan Starkey wrapped in the arms of a woman he hardly knows, his troubles are only beginning. Within hours his virtually anonymous girlfriend has been murdered, and before anyone can sort out whether she was killed by the IRA, Protestant extremists, or a jealous beau, Starkey becomes the killer's next target. He had always kept himself above Belfast's violent fray with the cynical, beer-drenched wit that fueled his notorious column in a Protestant newspaper. But when the Belfast police mark Starkey as their prime suspect, his wits are suddenly all he has left to keep himself ahead of both sides of the law--and to win back his wife. As he seeks to solve the crime himself, his frantic pursuit of the only clues to the killer's identity leads him deep into the most guarded reaches of Northern Irish political power.
Overflowing with crisp dialogue and taut with sinister violence,
Divorcing Jack, winner of the Betty Trask Prize for Fiction, is a novel you won't want to put down.
In Colin Bateman's first novel,
Divorcing Jack, a witty Belfast newspaper columnist named Dan Starkey gets drunk, falls in lust, and finds himself helplessly mired in trouble with his wife and the law. Shortly after Starkey's wife catches him in the arms of another woman, that woman is murdered and Starkey becomes the prime suspect. It turns out that the deceased woman was related to an important political figure, and now thugs from several of Northern Ireland's factions are out to get Starkey. The columnist decides he must track down the killer in order to clear his own name. During the investigation, he uncovers a scandal that could potentially alter the outcome of the next national election--and destroy the country's hopes for peace.
Mostly though, this thriller chronicles the beleaguered journalist's lame efforts to stay out of trouble. Starkey isn't exactly a man of action; in fact, he's a likeable character partly because he knows he's a weak man. Late in the book, Starkey sums up his predicament: "The world was still after me, Patricia was still missing, I was still a killer on the run, and I had a disturbing tendency to burst into tears, but I wasn't going to let little things like that get me down." He copes with stress by 1) drinking too much and 2) making jokes. When a nun in a miniature car saves Starkey from a hail of gunfire, for instance, he spends a few moments wondering what the proper name of her headgear is and decides to call it a Godpiece. Dan Starkey makes an entertaining guide to war-torn Northern Ireland, even while he discovers, time and again, that the pen is not mightier than the sword. --Jill Marquis
