Sad Bastard

Publishers Weekly

The eponymous antihero of Hamilton's sequel to Headbanger is once again Pat Coyne, a down-and-out Dublin police officer given to paranoid rantings and delusions of grandeur: "He shouted at the radio, railing against corruption as if it affected him personally. Every change in his country, every sign of progress was an assault on his persona." It hasn't been a good year for Coyne: he has been out of work since an injury during a traumatic fire; he's separated from his wife, Carmel, a New Age healer whose affections he desperately wants to win back; and his son, Jimmy, a young man with "a vocation for pure mayhem," is still living with him. Out on a bender one evening, Jimmy inadvertently steals a bag of money from thug Mongi O Doherty, who then kills Coyne's friend Tommy Nolan when he happens upon the scene. Jimmy becomes a suspect in Tommy's murder, but even worse, he's got Mongi on his tail. Plenty of other characters are thrown into the mix, including the bothersome Sergeant Corrigan, who is investigating the murder; Ms. Dunford, Coyne's platitude-spouting therapist; and Corina, a Romanian woman who owes Mongi money and is befriended by Coyne after she is caught shoplifting. For all Coyne's bluster, there is something sad and vulnerable about him; he is reminiscent of a (slightly) more well-adjusted Ignatius Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces, as Roddy Doyle might have imagined him. There are plenty of hilarious scenes in this short novel, and Hamilton ties them together skillfully, but audiences will have more fun tracking Coyne's various tribulations if they first read Headbanger, released in the States earlier this year. (Sept.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Lovers of rogue cop Pat Coyne's antics in the streets and pubs of a changing Dublin, amply supplied in Headbangers (p. 438), will find added amusements here as Coyne struggles against himself and a big-toothed murderer to protect his family. All is not well for our hero at the outset: he's on recovery leave from the constabulary after suffering internal injuries in a fire, has separated from his wife Carmel, and has let his only son Jimmy drift into reckless behavior-which in one morning's wee hours places the lad within sight of a murder. Jimmy steals the murderer's bag of dollars and becomes a suspect in the investigation, but Coyne is unaware of his boy's predicament. He has enough to do trying without success to patch things up with Carmel, whose New Age bent has turned her into a healer with "magic" stones, while he rails against a prosperous "new" Ireland seemingly bent on destroying the cityscapes and traditions he loves so well. He's a sputtering, smoldering pile waiting for a breeze; what finally lights him up is the sight of Carmel smooching with Dublin's most ruthless (and tasteless) real-estate developer. Coyne's path of destruction takes him to (and through) the developer's door just as Jimmy falls into the clutches of the murderer, but Coyne manages to steer the police in the bad guys' direction while carrying on with his own guerrilla activity: "useless" deeds that somehow heal and redeem him. Richly, darkly comic-with details down to what everybody had for lunch-and a solid thriller as well. It's the quirks of character, though, that prove most memorable.