The Glorious Heresies

Maureen Phelan, back in Cork after forty years abroad, kills an intruder in her flat with a religious statue and calls her estranged son Jimmy, now the city's most feared gangster, to help make the body disappear, and McInerney uses that single reflexive act of violence to fan outward into every other character's life: Jimmy enlists Tony Cusack to dispose of the corpse, and Tony's teenage son Ryan, already dealing drugs to keep his family solvent, gets pulled deeper into a world his father was supposed to be protecting him from. The Holy Stone doing the killing is not incidental; Maureen's disdain for the Church that nearly institutionalized her as a young unmarried mother makes the murder weapon a small, savage joke about which authority actually failed her.

Ryan is the novel's moral center precisely because he is never sentimentalized: barely fifteen, dealing hash and worse to fund a household his alcoholic father can't hold together, falling in real, complicated love with a girl named Karine while building a criminal résumé that will follow him for the rest of the (eventually sequeled) series. McInerney writes Cork's post-crash poverty not as backdrop but as the actual mechanism producing every choice in the book, a city hollowed out by the recession finding that its criminal economy is one of the few that still pays.

Georgie, a sex worker whose vanished boyfriend Robbie turns out to be the man Maureen killed, spends the novel searching for answers that lead her directly into the danger everyone else has been trying to contain, and the way the narrative treats her, as collateral rather than as a woman with any claim on the truth, mirrors exactly how Jimmy's organization treats her once her questions become inconvenient.

McInerney built her reputation writing the pseudonymous blog Arse End of Ireland as 'Sweary Lady,' documenting working-class Galway and Cork life in profane, funny, unsparing prose, and the novel imports that voice wholesale rather than sanding it down for literary respectability. The comedy is never separable from the misery it's describing; a joke about a dead body's inconvenient weight sits one paragraph away from Ryan calculating exactly how much hash he needs to move before his father drinks the electricity money, and that whiplash is the book's whole tonal signature.