The Patriot Game

Federal Agent Pete Riordan has two problems, and both of them could end with murder.

Convicted killer Mikey-mike Magro has never made a secret of the fact that if he ever gets out of jail, he's going to go after the man he thinks put him there, Jerry 'Digger' Doherty. And now it seems some very influential people are trying to get Magro pardoned and out on the street.

Riordan figures Bishop Paul Doherty, an old friend who also happens to be the Digger's brother, might put him on the right track - and he might just be able to help him with his second problem too: word is that a man is over from the old country intending to buy arms for the IRA. No one knows his name, or even what he looks like, but Riordan needs to find him fast - or his two problems could come together like a lighted fuse and a stick of gelignite.

“This author has the talent to make every word count, ratcheting up the tension as the story unfolds. . . a novel rich in characterisation”

DAILY MAIL online
I found myself swept along by Higgins's always vivid, larger-than-life characters and the mesmerizing exuberance of their language...a uniquely gifted writer who does at least as well by the Hogarthian Boston he knows as Raymond Chandler once did for Southern California NEW YORK TIMES
He can write dialogue so authentic it spits LIFE
A novelist of extraordinary intelligence and originality SUNDAY TIMES
Every American crime writer of the past 30 years owes a debt to George V Higgins. Higgins is the daddy. Read him and rejoice -- Val McDermid
Higgins deserves to stand in the company of Chandler and Hammett as one of the true innovators in crime fiction -- Scott Turow
Dailymail.co.uk

George V. Higgins was a lawyer in the Massachusetts Attorney General's office, in the Organized Crime section and the Criminal Division, and an Assistant United States Attorney, in Boston. He then founded his own private practice, defending Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy and Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Described as 'the Balzac of the Boston underworld', he wrote more than twenty novels, including a number of lowlife masterpieces constructed almost entirely out of pitch-perfect dialogue. He died in 1999.

Federal Agent Pete Riordan has two problems, and both of them could end with murder.Convicted killer Mikey-mike Magro has never made a secret of the fact that if he ever gets out of jail, he's going to go after the man he thinks put him there, Jerry 'Digger' Doherty. And now it seems some very influential people are trying to get Magro pardoned and out on the street.Riordan figures Bishop Paul Doherty, an old friend who also happens to be the Digger's brother, might put him on the right track - and he might just be able to help him with his second problem too: word is that a man is over from the old country intending to buy arms for the IRA. No one knows his name, or even what he looks like, but Riordan needs to find him fast - or his two problems could come together like a lighted fuse and a stick of gelignite.

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