Rob Kitchin

First Line: The young man was lying on the gentle slope down to the River Boyne, his head a foot from the shallow water.

It's been six months since Detective Superintendent Colm McEvoy of Ireland's National Bureau of Criminal Investigation dealt with a particularly crafty serial killer in The Rule Book, and things haven't gotten any better.

If anything, they're worse. Recession, budget cuts... it all means that the few who are left have three times as much to do. When McEvoy has the murders of show more a young Lithuanian immigrant and an elderly German billionaire added to his workload, he's at the verge of meeting himself coming and going.

McEvoy is still grieving for his wife who died of cancer a year ago, but he's finding himself attracted to a co-worker. At least while he's flirting he now has suits that fit, although he does have a difficult time keeping them clean.

The murder of the anonymous Lithuanian youth has no leads, but McEvoy is finding plenty of skeletons in the billionaire's closet. With a crime scene investigator injured by a pipe bomb and a local cop insisting that he has a right to wade into the middle of an investigation, it's a good thing McEvoy still suffers from insomnia because the poor man has so many plates spinning that he doesn't have a second to spare.

The White Gallows fulfills the promise shown in The Rule Book. McEvoy is exhausted and flawed, but he wants everything done right. His family supports him even though they're exasperated at the amount of time he spends away from his young daughter. The plot moves surefootedly through many twists and turns, and although I'd pieced together some of the clues, there were still several that surprised me.

In many ways, what I enjoy the most about these books is twofold: (1) I enjoy reading about a caring, exhausted man who makes mistakes but doesn't know how to quit until the job is done, and (2) the books contain a hearty dose of reality. The main characters are not bulletproof, and all the investigations aren't solved and tied up in pretty little ribbons when the last page is turned.

I do hope that a third book is in the works. One of these days, McEvoy has to get a full night's restful sleep... and manage to keep his suit clean for an entire day! show less

The Rule Book is an intricately plotted police procedural set in and around Dublin, in the atmosphere of impending social and political failure that eventually led to the Celtic Tiger having its head unceremoniously expelled from its ass by the 2008 banking crisis.

The book was published in 2009, but Kitchin's 'Acknowledgements' on the final page are dated August 2008. Thus, he was probably writing the story in 2007 and the beginning of 2008. The novel shows how contemporary crime fiction, as show more opposed to historical crime fiction--which has the benefit of hindsight--can, in the hands of a prescient writer, capture the most salient elements of a corrupt state, although at the time of writing the writer doesn't know what is going to happen in a few months' or a few years' time.

Detective Superintendent Colm McEvoy is put in charge of the hunt for a serial killer who, after every murder, leaves behind a deliberate set of clues, but in never enough detail--until it is too late. McEvoy is a decent man, a person whose human failings are numerous, and whose grieving for his dead wife, prevents him from functioning effectively, either as father or policeman. These traits reminded me of the police officers to be found in the crime novels of Henning Mankell and Arnaldur Indridason. A big difference between Kitchin and Mankell or Indridason is that Kitchin refuses to tie everything up neatly with a pink bow at the end of the book.

You want Colm McEvoy to succeed but, at every turn of Kitchin's cruel handling of him, he screws up even worse than the time before, and the reader becomes more and more convinced of what McEvoy admits himself, that if the killer is ever unmasked it will only be by accident. Kitchin invites you to to witness McEvoy being used as a convenient scape-goat by his superior, a commanding officer who says he is there to protect him but who is, in reality, a cynical placeholder. Time and again, McEvoy is taken off the case, only to be put straight back on it, as his commanding officers (his boss and his boss's boss, right up to the Minister for Justice) realize that, if they no longer have a fall-guy, they will have to take the responsibility for failure themselves. Colm McEvoy is also undermined throughout the book by a Detective Inspector named Charlie Deegan, who brought to mind the way in which another self-serving Charlie, who went under the surname of Haughey, undermined the then solid underpinnings of the Irish State with which he was entrusted. Deegan's conduct, undermining Colm McEvoy at every opportunity, gets him taken off the case, once, but people in positions of power are ready to pull strings to reinstate him, and he too is kept on until it is too late.

Kitchin's descriptions of the hounding of Colm McEvoy and his family, by journalists from the Sun, and the influence the press had on figures of power in Ireland (terrified of having people from abroad scrutinize their incompetence) foreshadows the well-deserved wave of public disgust in the U.K. that was soon to hit News International and all who sail in her.

Kitchin dissects an Ireland where men who get into positions of power--shown here in the shape of the country's police force, but not limited to them--suffer from a lack of expertise in a field they are supposed to master; spend an inordinate amount of time trying to please the media; and pay more attention to form than substance. Colm McEvoy's boss is more interested in the state of his clothes, and how he will appear to the television cameras at the frequent press briefings, than he is in the details of the murders McEvoy has to investigate. People in authority refuse to shoulder the responsibility that should be the corollary of their well-paying jobs; push important decisions down the chain of command until they find the guy who will take the fall; plan every action in the way that will best cover their asses, and, most tellingly of all, have no idea of what needs to be done to thwart sophisticated enemies, whether they be serial killers, (or, by extension), financial whizz-kids, who are left free to run rings around the stately, plump, prevaricating authorities.

Through the prism of the Irish police force, the novel depicts a whole country that doesn't have the smarts to understand any of the challenges it has brought on itself by moving away from a rustic set of values towards items of interest dear to the gutter press: sensationalism, human weakness, the wreckage resulting from the availability of cheap and plentiful booze and drugs and the rivers of teenage vomit and drunken violence running through Dublin's O'Connell Street late on a Saturday night.

The novel points out that there has never been a serial killer in Ireland. Until four years ago, the Republic of Ireland had also not had a banking crisis that beggared belief when it happened, but for which all the signs and clues had been there for perspicacious economists like Morgan Kelly. Morgan Kelly, a man who specialized in the economics of Medieval Iceland, realized what was about to hit Ireland when he discovered, nearly by accident, that neither the Banks nor the Government were following their own basic economic rule book.

Colm McEvoy, in some ways, brought to mind the tragic figure of Brian Lenihan junior, the Irish Minister for Finance, and especially the night he was left alone to fend for himself, a distraught figure wandering the back roads of Ireland, charged by his political, banking and property-developer masters and colleagues to find a silver-bullet solution to the Irish banking crisis, a fall guy who was immediately blamed for the only remedy he could find, the disastrous state guarantee of the Irish Banks.

At the time of the novel, McEvoy is shown as a symbol of the decent people who were trying to hold Ireland together in face of an unprecedented assault on its identity. Too busy at work to get a regular wash, in dire lack of sleep, wearing a disheveled suit, now two sizes too large for him since he began to grieve for his late wife, he is obviously not up to the job he eagerly takes on. All he has going for him is a basic level of competence and a streak of honesty, but he is no match for the evil mind of the sophisticated killer, who spies on him and taunts him with clues which will eventually show that the center of everything rotten lies in what has constituted a pillar of the Irish State, ever since its founding: Maynooth.

Rob Kitchin leaves the reader with the feeling that what he or she has understood is pretty bad, but worse is still to come. Any other mind like the serial killer's--determined, sophisticated and evil--will also be free to run rings around the plodders to whom it arrogantly gives all the clues. The authorities will be incapable of catching the most powerful criminals in their midst, even when the wrongdoers disregard their own rules and make basic mistakes or, as the serial killer does at one moment, hold the door open for them while wearing a ridiculous disguise.

The Rule Book is a page-turner and will give any discerning reader of crime fiction extremely good value for his or her money. show less

First Line: His eyes fixed on the sword and started to travel its length, down from the black handle, over the plain hilt and along the two-inch wide shaft to where it penetrated the young woman's mouth.

At the beginning of The Rule Book, Colm McEvoy is already a man on the edge of the abyss. A Detective Superintendent of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Dublin, Ireland, he's still mourning the death of his wife from cancer while trying to adjust to being a single father. He's show more lost so much weight that his suits hang off him, and he's trying to stop smoking, since that's what killed his wife.

Responding to a call about a murder at the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, McEvoy finds the body of a young woman who's seemingly been sacrificed... and Chapter One of The Rule Book, a self-help guide for prospective serial killers. Less than twenty-four hours later, a second body is found along with Chapter Two. When the third body (along with another chapter) is discovered, it's plain to see that the self-proclaimed "Raven" fully intends to slaughter one person per day until The Rule Book is published in its entirety. The case garners worldwide press, and with media, police and political pressure increasing by the hour, the shaky McEvoy must find The Raven.

Two characters lured me deeper and deeper into this book: The Raven, a serial killer who's completely convinced of his own brilliance, and Colm McEvoy. The sole maternal bone in my body is microscopic in size, but somehow Kitchin made me want to mother the detective superintendent:

' "Well, hopefully, we can grab him before he has a chance to kill," McEvoy said without conviction, rubbing his face, exhausted. His left hand had started to shake again. He tried to still it, but it wouldn't respond to instruction. All of his muscles felt tight, aching with tiredness and stress. He tried to roll his shoulders to ease the pressure thinking that if someone was to tap him with their knuckle he would probably sound a middle C.'

After some uninterrupted sleep, good meals, clothes that fit and some nicotine gum or patches, I could've helped McEvoy solve the case much quicker. (Or do I have a touch of The Raven's ego?)

I found the investigation compelling with a minimal amount of gore. Although I was quite good at seeing which leads McEvoy needed to follow, I was no good at identifying The Raven until just a few pages before the unmasking. With the storyline and pacing-- and especially with the character of McEvoy-- I'm hoping that The Rule Book is the first in a series featuring the detective superintendent. show less

At a Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in the mountains outside Dublin a young woman has been killed: affixed to a bed via a sword threading through her mouth and neck. Detective Superintendent Colm McEvoy is put in charge of the case which soon turns from a routine murder investigation into something far more sinister. The girl’s killer, who calls himself The Raven, has left calling cards and the first chapter of a book about how to commit the perfect series of murders. If he is to be show more believed there will be six more murders over the subsequent days and McEvoy and the team don’t have nearly enough information to even know where to start looking for him.

This book is the best I can ever recall reading in the way it depicts the wretched desperation that the police must experience in the face of something as truly awful as people being randomly and brutally killed and being unable to wade through the morass of evidence in time to save lives. So often in fictional hunts for serial killers (especially on TV shows like Criminal Minds) investigators take such things in their stride which is at least as disturbing to me as the killings themselves. The Rule Book really gave me a sense of how hideous it must be to know people are relying on you for their safety but despite the fact you’re working all hours and trying your best you just can’t get the right answers in time.

On top of feeling like he’s letting down an entire city McEvoy struggles throughout the book to deal with his own recent widowhood, the increasingly nasty office politics that inevitably surround such a high-profile case and the pure madness that is the modern media (another aspect to the story that I thought was depicted in a depressingly accurate way). He’s a fantastic character: far from perfect but never giving up despite provocation and I can’t be the only one who just wanted to give the man a hug. The other characters are also realistic though not all as sympathetic. McEvoy’s immediate superior, DCS Tony Bishop, whose skills seem to be more in the arse-covering line than the detecting line, is an all too familiar beast but there are friends too for McEvoy in the form of a humorous pathologist and a profiler brought in towards the end of the case.

When I saw that the book was a about a serial killer I was a little worried because they’re not my favourite kind of crime novel (I know there are not nearly so many serial killers in the world as there are in fiction so I sometimes struggle with the credibility factor) but the subject was handled well. Even though there are snippets of action seen from the killer’s point of view the book is really about the events that happen and the people who are investigating them. The story is full of suspense as ‘we’ (and it does feel like ‘we’) race along with police to see if The Raven can be stopped in time.

I was also pleased to find The Rule Book has a very solid sense of its location. From the iconic picture of the statue of Big Jim Larkin in Dublin’s city centre on the cover to the use of local language, particularly in dialogue, to descriptions of an interesting variety of locations in and around the city this is a very Irish book. I have visited Dublin a couple of times and I found myself easily able to transport myself back there while reading along.

On one level this is a ripping crime fiction yarn which would be pleasing enough but there’s more to it than that. It also made me ponder about the role we all play in making things impossible for police in such circumstances with our insatiable desire for gory details and our seeming unwillingness to accept that real life is rarely, if ever, as simple as portrayed on shows like CSI. The Rule Book is more polished, intelligent and compelling than we have a right to expect from a debut crime fiction writer. show less