Sad Bastard - Softcover

Penzler Pick, December 2001: Fans of Bill James and Ian Rankin will want to run, not walk, to get a copy of this gritty urban crime comedy set in a contemporary Dublin where even the likes of Pat Coyne is seeing a therapist. On leave from the police force after sustaining serious burns in the line of duty, he's forced to show up for sessions with one Ms. Clair Dunford to qualify for disability pay.

He wasn't taken in by her motherly approach--Coyne was thinking compensation as he answered her routine questions with the maximum degree of neurosis, presenting an alarming impression of total human wreck. Depression. Irrational fears. Memory loss. Lack of concentration. Post-traumatic stress disorder! By Jesus, Coyne had them all.

There's more going on in Coyne's life. His wife, Carmel, has left him, and some small-time local crooks are trying their best to kill his son, Jimmy. Plus, no longer sworn to uphold the law, Coyne can watch a shoplifter with disinterested appreciation of her technique, then impulsively, and imaginatively, intervene to get her off the hook.

It's a bloody, topsy-turvy world, he realizes, once he learns that she's a Romanian who has paid to be smuggled into Ireland. In the bad old days, before the country's economic miracle, people paid to get out--but nothing's sacred anymore, not even his own teenaged daughters' innocent flesh. Did Pat Coyne ever imagine he'd be the kind of dad who'd be ferrying his girls to get their belly buttons and noses pierced?

A straight line does exist between the Romanian shoplifter and the corpse of poor Tommy Nolan, a harbor bum whose death by drowning Coyne knows wasn't an accident. Hugo Hamilton is in no hurry to draw that line in this sequel to the equally colorful Headbanger. What he prefers to do is prove himself once more a master of constructing sentences you find yourself reading again--even reading aloud--and relishing. --Otto Penzler

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.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.