Hard Cases

 Book 34 of my 2025 Reading Challenge

read from March 17 - 26

Hard Cases: True Stories of Irish Crime by Gene Kerrigan

published 1996

Summary (excerpt from the book jacket)

Hard Cases is a collection of startling stories about the reality of crime and court cases in Ireland. In these stories, there are no crime bosses with quaint nicknames; the police don't collect convenient clues that tell them who dunnit.

Instead, we get cases both famous and obscure in which the outcome in sometimes just, sometimes unsettling.

My Opinion

3 stars

The writing was compelling with strong opening sentences for each story.  For example, "Shercock" started with the sentence, "Peter Matthews went into Shercock leaning on a crutch and came out of the village in an ambulance".

I ended up with a 3 star rating because when the crimes were interesting I was very invested but there were a few crimes that didn't grab me.  The word I seemed to use most often when jotting notes while reading was "frustrating"...sometimes it was frustration that the authorities were bumbling and the criminals were getting away, sometimes it was frustration that the authorities were corrupt and detaining the wrong people, and sometimes it was overall frustration with the system in general.

All in all, a wide variety of cases that didn't feel dated, even reading decades after being published.