Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Collins Ireland for the opportunity to review this book in my own way. The wonderful town that is Tullyanna, fictional but I would imagine to have been made up of maybe one or two real places. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

This is a crime novel with twists, with the latter pertaining not just to “who did it” but to the genre itself - part humorous, part Irish history around the times of “The Troubles” and part true literary endeavour. This book is part of a Random Things blog tour, to see what the other reviewers thought, visit in their blogs listed below. In my case, until the first 20 per cent or so, I was reading on—not uninterested but also not gripped.

At its heart, this is a darned good murder mystery and I loved the way the trio of investigators go about tracking down the clues in their own special ways. Dove's funeral brings this unlikely trio together as they strive to finally discover what happened to Dove and Sandra. Joanne has a genuine passion for journalism which is appreciable, yet she was my least favourite of the three, causing rather than resolving trouble (even after having done it once for Dove and realising she was wrong, she does it all over again).

Ardal grew up in County Monaghan in Ireland, his father was a TD (MP) in the Irish parliament and a cabinet minister. Having got through the first ten percent of the book, it felt as if I should be at least a quarter of the way through. but Brouhaha careers between state-of-the-nation metaphor, black comic thriller and half-baked mystery, without ever settling on a coherent tone. e. that the Cause is greater than the Organization and the Organization is greater than the Leadership… the original Cause was more or less forgotten in the mists of time”. The storyline moves between the events around the unsolved disappearance of teenager Sandra Mohan in 1994, and the impact of Sharkey, Kevin and Joanne's efforts to finally get to the truth following Dove's death - when all Tullyanna's dirty little secrets come spilling out.I look forward to reading more from this author with a surprisingly ( to those who only know the tv characters) literary talent. But I think that’s why I can’t say too much or want to admit to myself how dodge this book was in parts.

The only novel by a comedian that I remember as being something other than a cash-in was Steve Martin’s The Pleasure Of My Company, a weird, surrealism-inflected novel about a man who has finally won the “Most Average American” competition. Each of the principal characters reaches an accommodation with the real world, and a kind of elegiac acceptance of it. It is a place he has been trying to avoid for the past ten years, after events got out of hand following the disappearance of his friend Sandra Mohan, who was Dove's on-off girlfriend. Set in the fictional Irish town of Tullyanna, in the days after the Troubles, the story opens with the death by suicide of Dermot ‘Dove’ Connolly.

One thing that didn't quite work for me was the insertion of quite a bit of Irish culture and history which was often so interesting in itself, requiring further investigation, that it was a tad distracting as it did keep drawing me out of the story I was reading. I would liken this to the writing of Caimh McDonnell - his novels portray Dublin in the same manner O'Hanlon describes the Irish boarder region. The story keeps you guessing from start to finish, and it has an intriguing bevy of threads woven into it about secrets and the sins of the past. Needed 100 more pages to wrap up the ending without feeling like it was just a chase to stay under a word count.