Introduction

The best first novel I've read in years. . . . It's a flat-out terror trip.James Ellroy

Not only one of the finest thriller debuts of the last ten years, but also one of the best Irish novels, in any genre, of recent times.John Connolly

The Ghosts of Belfast is the book when the world finally sits up and goes WOW, the Irish really have taken over the world of crime writing. Stuart Neville is Ireland's answer to Henning Mankell.Ken Bruen

Library Journal blog

Neville's debut novel is tragic, violent, exciting, plausible, and compelling. . . . The Ghosts of Belfast is dark, powerful, insightful, and hard to put down.Booklist

Kirkus

[Stuart] Neville has the talent to believably blend the tropes of the crime novel and those of a horror, in the process creating a page-turning thriller akin to a collaboration between John Connolly and Stephen King. . . [The Ghosts of Belfast] is a superb thriller, and one of the first great post-Troubles novels to emerge from Northern Ireland.--Sunday Independent (Ireland)

Fegan has been a hard man, an IRA killer in northern Ireland. Now that peace has come, he is being haunted day and night by twelve ghosts: a mother and infant, a schoolboy, a butcher, an RUC constable, and seven other of his innocent victims. In order to appease them, he's going to have to kill the men who gave him orders.

As he's working his way down the list he encounters a woman who may offer him redemption; she has borne a child to an RUC officer and is an outsider too. Now he has given Fate and his quarry a hostage. Is this Fegan's ultimate mistake?

Stuart Neville is a partner in a multimedia design business based in Armagh, northern Ireland. This novel is the first in a series.

Editorial Review

No editorial review at this time.

Excerpt

Maybe if he had one more drink they’d leave him alone. Gerry Fegan
told himself that lie before every swallow. He chased the whiskey’s
burn with a cool black mouthful of Guinness and placed the glass back
on the table. Look up and they’ll be gone, he thought.
No. They were still there, still staring. Twelve of them if he counted
the baby in its mother’s arms.
He was good and drunk now. When his stomach couldn’t hold
any more he would let Tom the barman show him to the door, and
the twelve would follow Fegan through the streets of Belfast, into his
house, up his stairs, and into his bedroom. If he was lucky, and drunk
enough, he might pass out before their screaming got too loud to
bear. That was the only time they made a sound, when he was alone
and on the edge of sleep. When the baby started crying, that was the
worst of it.
Fegan raised the empty glass to get Tom’s attention.
“Haven’t you had enough, Gerry?” Tom asked. “Is it not home
time yet? Everyone’s gone.”
“One more,” Fegan said, trying not to slur. He knew Tom would
not refuse. Fegan was still a respected man in West Belfast, despite the
drink.
Sure enough, Tom sighed and raised a glass to the optic. He
brought the whiskey over and counted change from the stained table -
top. The gummy film of old beer and grime sucked at his shoes as he
walked away.
Fegan held the glass up and made a toast to his twelve companions.
One of the five soldiers among them smiled and nodded in return.
The rest just stared.
“Fuck you,” Fegan said. “Fuck the lot of you.”
None of the twelve reacted, but Tom looked back over his
shoulder. He shook his head and continued walking to the bar.
Fegan looked at each of his companions in turn. Of the five
soldiers three were Brits and two were Ulster Defence Regiment.
Another of the followers was a cop, his Royal Ulster Constabulary
uniform neat and stiff, and two more were Loyalists, both Ulster
Freedom Fighters. The remaining four were civilians who had
been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He remembered doing
all of them, but it was the civilians whose memories screamed the
loudest.
There was the butcher with his round face and bloody apron. Fegan
had dropped the package in his shop and held the door for the woman
and her baby as she wheeled the pram in. They’d smiled at each other.
He’d felt the heat of the blast as he jumped into the already moving
car, the blast that should have come five minutes after they’d cleared
the place.
The other was the boy. Fegan still remembered the look in his eyes
when he saw the pistol. Now the boy sat across the table, those same
eyes boring into him.
Fegan couldn’t hold his gaze, so he turned his eyes downward.
Tears pooled on the tabletop. He brought his fingers to the hollows of
his face and realised he’d been weeping.
“Jesus,” he said.
He wiped the table with his sleeve and sniffed back the tears. The
pub’s stale air clung to the back of his throat, as thick as the duncolored
paint on the walls. He scolded himself. He neither needed nor
deserved pity, least of all his own. Weaker men than him could live
with what they’d done. He could do the same.
A hand on his shoulder startled him.
“Time you were going, Gerry,” Michael McKenna said.
Tom slipped into the storeroom behind the bar. McKenna paid
him to be discreet, to see and hear nothing.
Fegan knew the politician would come looking for him. He was
smartly dressed in a jacket and trousers, and his fine-framed designer
glasses gave him the appearance of an educated man. A far cry from the teenager Fegan had run the streets with thirty years ago. Wealth
looked good on him.
“I’m just finishing,” Fegan said.
“Well, drink up and I’ll run you home.” McKenna smiled down at
him, his teeth white and even. He’d had them fixed so he could look
presentable for the cameras. The party leadership had insisted on it
before they gave him the nomination for his seat in the Assembly. At
one time, not so long past, it had been against party policy to take a
seat at Stormont. But times change, even if people don’t.
“I’ll walk,” Fegan said. “It’s only a couple of minutes.”
“It’s no trouble,” McKenna said. “Besides, I wanted a word.”
Fegan nodded and took another mouthful of stout. He held it on
his tongue when he noticed the boy had risen from his place on the
other side of the table. It took a moment to find him, shirtless and
skinny as the day he died, creeping up behind McKenna.
The boy pointed at the politician’s head. He mimed firing, his
hand thrown upwards by the recoil. His mouth made a plosive
movement, but no sound came.
Fegan swallowed the Guinness and stared at the boy. Something
stirred in his mind, one memory trying to find another. The chill at
his center pulsed with his heartbeat.
“Do you remember that kid?” he asked.
“Don’t, Gerry.” McKenna’s voice carried a warning.
“I met his mother today. I was in the graveyard and she came up to
me.”
“I know you did,” McKenna said, taking the glass from Fegan’s
fingers.
“She said she knew who I was. What I’d done. She said—”
“Gerry, I don’t want to know what she said. I’m more curious
about what you said to her. That’s what we need to talk about. But
not here.” McKenna squeezed Fegan’s shoulder. “Come on, now.”
“He hadn’t done anything. Not really. He didn’t tell the cops
anything they didn’t know already. He didn’t deserve that. Jesus, he
was seventeen. We didn’t have to—”
One hard hand gripped Fegan’s face, the other his thinning hair,
... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

1) The Ghosts of Belfast is set in post]conflict Northern Ireland and examines the gap between the
peace that exists on the surface and the tension beneath. How did the Belfast portrayed in the book
compare to your preconceptions of the city? Did it present a familiar image, one you know from
news reports of the Troubles and the peace process, or was it something different from what you
expected?

2) In the past, many Americans have viewed Irish paramilitaries in a romanticised way, seeing them
as freedom fighters rather than terrorists. In turn, Irish paramilitaries have played up to that image
and used it to help raising funds in the US, with many millions of dollars funnelled into both the
political and militant strands. To what extent does the book dispel or reinforce this romanticised
view? Do you think Americans, including those prominent Irish Americans who have publicly
supported Irish paramilitaries in the past, have a different perspective on political violence after
9/11?

3) The novel's protagonist, Gerry Fegan, has carried out horrendous acts in his past and commits
more murders in the course of the story. He would be the villain in most books, but the author asks
the reader to empathise, if not sympathise, with him. Does the novel succeed in making him
sympathetic? If so, how?

4) Readers of the UK edition of the book, including some critics, have been divided in their
interpretation of Gerry Fegan's "followers". Some are convinced they are paranormal entities, the
actual spirits of the people he killed in the past. Others are adamant they are psychological
manifestations of his guilt, figments of his remorseful and drink]addled imagination. Which is the
correct reading: ghosts of the dead or phantoms of the mind?

5) Gerry Fegan seeks atonement for past killings by spilling yet more blood. The novel takes no
moral stance on the idea of violence as a means of correcting injustice, and Fegan himself is
conflicted on this. Should the book have condemned Fegan's actions more clearly? While the story
is entirely fictional, is the reader in a way complicit in the bloodshed by empathising with the killer?
Does that reflect on the reader's, or indeed the author's, own moral standards? Can violence ever
be justified given the right social or moral context?

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