Falling Glass

By: Adrian McKinty

Narrated by: Gerard Doyle

Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

In this noir thriller by a New York Times best-selling and Edgar award-winning author, a retired IRA fixer takes a lucrative last job finding the ex-wife and daughters of a wealthy airline owner.

Richard Coulter is a man who has everything. His beautiful new wife is pregnant, his upstart airline is undercutting the competition and moving from strength to strength, his diversification into the casino business in Macau has been successful, and his fabulous Art Deco house on an Irish cliff top has just been featured in Architectural Digest.

But then, for some reason, his ex-wife Rachel doesn’t keep her side of the custody agreement and vanishes off the face of the earth with Richard’s two daughters. Richard hires Killian, a formidable ex-enforcer for the IRA, to track her down before Rachel, a recovering drug addict, harms herself or the girls.

As Killian follows Rachel’s trail, he begins to see that there is a lot more to this case than first meets the eye and that a 30-year-old secret is going to put all of them in terrible danger.

McKinty is at his continent-hopping, well-paced, evocative best in this thriller, moving between his native Ireland and distant cities within a skin-of-his-teeth timeframe.

©2011 Adrian McKinty (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Good story until the end

Gerard Doyle makes McKinty. Great story until the unsatisfactory ending; I’m a simple man with an IQ almost equal to Einstein: I can’t bury Michael or Killian.

Thriller

The main characters are interesting, the settings are interesting and the storyline is realistic and believable.

Crossroads of violence

A thoughtful tale of people walking at the crossroads of violence, political violence in Northern Ireland and Chechnya, criminal violence in corporate worlds. There is no Rambo style hero here (though there is ample action), but rather a Coenesque cleverness set against a landscape of Tinkers and pastoralism. The more I listened the more I was drawn in, as though I were just another believer in our hero’s golden tongue.

One of his most satisfying

I've always enjoyed Adrian McKinty's novels and this one is no exception. In this one, you are drawn into the world of Killian - a retired bodyguard/enforcer who has been forced out of retirement with the crash of the "Celtic Tiger". McKinty crafts a believable and engaging character in Killian and gives him a fast moving plot full of twists and turns.
Well read, too!

Another great McKinty novel

What made the experience of listening to Falling Glass the most enjoyable?

I enjoyed this as much as the Dead series. Killian is a fantastically complex and well rounded protagonist. As good as Forsythe.

Buy it.

Premise was maybe a bit trite/cliched but this is a book about the power of words. And it’s well done, bravo McKinty.

More mature McKinty

I came to this book after listening to the Michael Forsyth trilogy (but not having read Fifty Grand). The first thing that struck me is how much the pyrotechnics (both plotwise and stylistically) are cooled down.

In the Forsyth books, there are multiple shootouts that can end up stretching credulity; here, we have a more cat-and-mouse plot, with a lot of energy going into characters hiding out from other characters. It's a nice refreshing change, as much as I loved the Forsyth books. Killian, the hero of the novel, is no superman, and so there's a constant knife-edge of tension, since odds are, if he gets in a fight he'll lose.

Verbally, the Forsyth books have poetic flights of fancy, which are fewer in this book. Although I missed them, they really stand out when they happen, since there are so few of them. Again, it's a refreshing change, and shows that McKinty can write in more than one voice, fitting his style to the more down-to-earth Killian.

Doyle, as always, seems perfectly suited to this material. It's hard to imagine another voice for these books (and, for that matter, I've heard Doyle on another author, and it felt lacking).

Beautiful. Terrible.

Adrian McKinty writes beautifully about terrible things. Gerard Doyle's performances on all of McKinty's novels are perfect. It's a great pleasure to listen to McKiinty's beautiful prose. Audible is a great way to enjoy all of his novels. His novels are dramatic and extremely violent with complex characters. I highly reccomend Falling Glass and all of Adrian McKinty's books on Audible.

Caught me by surprise

The emotions I went through caught me by surprise. I gradually became invested in these characters and their lives. At times I thought it was too descriptive, but it all built into the story. I'm so glad I read...well, listened to this book! I'm sure the performance added a great deal to my enjoyment.

The first time for this author.

I love this writer's style and descriptions of Irish life. This storyline was intriguing with a beautiful ending.