Divorcing Jack: A Dan Starkey Mystery (Dan Starkey Mysteries)

Product Information

The whirlwind of death, danger, politics and sex that picks him up and plunks him down, well the worse for wear, begins with a kiss wrapped around a shared breath mint. It looked like toffee poured into an icicle mold, briittle and unwieldy, the bruising on my face, all but invisible in the yellowed light of my room, was more noticeable but ignored, as most everyone was too busy looking at my jaggedy hair. I was upstairs with a girl I shouldn't have been upstairs with when my wife whispered in my ear, 'You have twenty-four hours to move out'.

Yet it always seems keen to be a comedy over everything else, which means when some pretty bracingly violent scenes happen along, it doesn't really suffer from any issues of tone. In a weird moment of black comedy, he accidentally kills the victim’s mother when he collides violently with her on the stairs as he makes a getaway. Bateman’s wit carries this: as thrillers go, Divorcing Jack is laugh-out-loud funny – in a dark and violent way. Then again, the film doesn't try to be serious: it's an out-and-out chase movie, stuffed with visual gags and boasting a fine comedy script which bends the ear with delight.You understood that he was an unconventional weirdo and that’s why he did the things he did, which somehow always worked out in his favor. As he hunts for the tape, Starkey is pursued by several parties, including an IRA contingent with a reputation for mayhem and violence. It's good to see David Thewlis, one of the finest British actors of his generation, play the lead in a British film – as he did in his prime, and not a side character in Hollywoodian films like Harry Potter.

The performance is stilted and doesn't flow well, which is a shame, because this is a great comic novel.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. After surviving an assault from a squad of hit men, retired CIA black ops agent Frank Moses reassembles his old team for an all-out war. Northern Irish columnist Dan Starkey and American journalist Charles Parker are sent out to cover the upcoming elections, in which the charismatic, former victim of the war, Michael Brinn seems the obvious winner, campaigning on a platform of disarmament and peace between the warring factions in Northern Ireland. Lee is obviously a layered hero who I felt deserved much more attention and a more satisfying ending.

A favourite of mine from the late 90s when I used to devour the excellent pulp fiction of Northern Irish novelist Colin Bateman, the source of this underrated movie. Before this, however, Starkey is caught cheating on his wife Patricia with Margaret, a young art student. The result is that he kicks Margaret's mother, who had come by to visit, down the stairs, killing her. I learnt quite a few things about Ireland in the book, including how back in the 1970s the majority of the Northern Ireland popolustion are Protestant and they do not often visit businesses with Catholics names.Celé se to odehrává v době, kdy si to protestanti a katolíci rozdávali pěkně na férovku, každou chvíli někdo vyletěl do povětří a na životy lidí se moc nehrálo. This gallery is dedicated to some of the best fiction and nonfiction portraying one of the greatest cities in the world.

Over-stretched and under-thought, the improbable story-line limps from chapter to chapter looking for a thread which will haul it to safety". Though tumultuous Irish history is key to this thriller, it is the characters that really made Divorcing Jack interesting for me. While Starkey is at Cooper's apartment, she plays a piece of classic music, by the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák. Anyway, that interested me, and I finally got around to reading that intriguingly constructed story.An eyecatching first American edition/first printing in Near Fine condition in alike dust-jacket; Winner of the Betsy Trask Prize for Fiction. This does not seem to be satisfactory for Keegan, but luckily for Starkey, he and his wife are saved in the last minute by Cooper, who storms in dressed as a nun wearing guns. I do like how Bateman integrates the then current political situation and local color into the fictional story and provides good details on the political and socioeconomic situations at the time.