Book review: "A Man with One of Those Faces" by Caimh McDonnell

Paul Muchrone was a guy who led a very complicated and lonely life. Former juvenile delinquent, orphan, and former member of a hurling team, Paul spent almost five years in cheating the elderly who have been abandoned in nursing homes and hospitals, taking advantage of his particularity of having a face easily confused with another person. Everything was going well until he ran into an old man who, in the midst of his delirium, tried to kill him; that individua turned out to be a legendary member of the Irish mafia who participated in a famous crime.

With this start, Caimh McDonnell delivers us one of those rare jewels that you find in the middle of the sea of books on which you navigate. First book from th Dublin Trilogy, this book can be considered equilibrated due that its 44 chapters deliver a combination of suspense, humor and irony. The plot traps you from the very first scene and don't let you go until it's finished.

His characters are, at least for me, a tribute to popular culture's icons as far as film stereotypes could be concerned. Not to mention that we have a tribute to the old-school classic policeman beating a la John McLane (Bunny McGarry), a nurse who evokes, a bit, at Miss Marple (Brigit Conroy)  and a guy who evokes Jack Sparrow and his constant escapes from the British army (Paul Muchrone).

Of the three mentioned characters, my favourite was Bunny McGarry.  This policeman so prone  to get information violently (he threw his boss from the balcony of his house after confirming that he was the squealer  of Gerry Fallon, the powerful leader of the Irish mafia) and without respect for the people (he hit a security guard in a pub without owing it or fearing it after escaping from the hospital) seems like a father who is very worried about his son; throughout the book he does not stop referring to Paul as "one of his boys", despite the fact that the latter resented him for having ruined the opportunity to be adopted and having a home in form.

While I was reading this book, I saw him on many occassions as that kind of parents who aren't interested in people seeing them as wild individuals as long as they don't lay their hands on their children. If it was the opposite case, well ... God help you, because if something Bunny has always been able to do is give you a punch in the face or in the balls  with Mabel (name of his hurling stick). That and to tell you insults more or less offensive from his arsenal of bad words.

And let's not forget the Irish slang, the Dublin pubs, and the mafia in all its might  chasing people who know very little about a very famous case that inspired a sort of a romance novel that turned out to be a big lie.

This is a book that I would highly recommend for those Spanish native speakers who are thinking of traveling to Ireland at some time or want to meet some widely used slangs in some predominantly English-speaking countries.