Back Home in Derry

The ceasefire has begun in 1995 between the Republicans and the Loyalists as Dan Delaney and his family are in Ireland seeking ancestral roots. They are drawn into helter-skelter pursuit of and by alleged IRA terrorists and Protestant and Catholic police from County Cork to Dublin, Belfast, and Derry. Ex-policeman and ex-national security operative Dan Delaney is 79 and regrets bending to family pressure to travel around Ireland. Instead of finding his grandfather's origins in County Cork, he finds his own troubles with car theft. The trouble ramps up in Dublin, where his daughter is almost killed in a grenade attack outside the Abbey Theatre. His mother's wrong-side-of-the-blanket relations in Derry have left him disinheritance hassles. Unlike the song, he does not wish he is back home in Derry, or anywhere else in this turbulent island of his ancestors. Can the trip trigger change all his long life he has resisted? In the final outing for Dan Delaney, Republican and Loyalist enmities are the historical backdrop, but it is the ad hoc Kiwi approach to problem solving that helped Dan and his family survive national security threats in Sydney, Israel, his native West Auckland, and Wellington, and his most testing threat in Derry. His long and modestly undistinguished career reaches a final solution to both his origins and his family's survival. It is a win/lose scenario -- and the loser dies. 'One of the most exhilarating or disturbing starts to a story a reader could imagine, depending on whose side you are on. The time is 1970 and the scene is infamous Falls Road, Belfast, at the time of the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland ... Forward to late 1990's and Dan Delaney is visiting Ireland to find his Irish roots spurred on by his wife and their two daughters ... when one is nearly killed by a hand grenade thrown as she leaves the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, thus beginning a rollicking tale through both Irish history, Irish politics and Irish towns and cities. As is the case with such stories you don't know who are the goodies or baddies ... One of the defining and endearing aspects of the series is the involvement of Delaney's family. This is unusual because most detective stories have 'lone wolf' protagonists who often involve a series of uncommitted lovers who they change with each story, a la James Bond.' Dr Michael O'Leary