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Detective Brian McKenna #4
Once In, Never Out Lib/E
A girl missing in New York. A political bombing in Iceland. No ordinary cop would see a connection. But Detective First Grade Brian McKenna didn't earn his reputation by being ordinary. In Once In, Never Out, McKenna travels the globe in pursuit of his darkest foe yet--a terrorist bomber whose next target could be New York's St. Patrick's Day Parade. Along the way he finds a good friend and cunning ally in Thor Erikson, Iceland's sole homicide detective. This is a case that brings McKenna to the edge of his abilities, and puts both his detecting and survival skills to the ultimate test.
- GenresMystery
Audio CD
First published January 15, 1998
51 people want to read
About the author
Dan Mahoney
19 books20 followers I was born in Manhattan on September 21, 1947, five minutes after Stephen King was born someplace in Maine. (I don't know what that means, but I'm hoping it means something.) I grew up in Manhattan and Queens and soon found myself to be the eldest of five children. I graduated from high school at age 16, a bad thing because I was too young to get a driver's license in New York and too stupid to realize that I had to go to college to get my ticket punched. Instead, I worked as a machinist and auto mechanic for a year before enlisting in the Marine Corps at age 17. A while later I found myself in Vietnam as a machine gunner with the 9th Marines, an outfit known as The Walking Dead. It was a very bad job, to say the least.
After getting discharged in one piece in 1968, I did as my father and grandfather had done before me and joined the NYPD. During the next twenty years I managed to get promoted regularly and served in various patrol and detective commands, mostly good jobs in mostly rotten places. I also took advantage of the VA Bill and finally went to college, attending John Jay College of Criminal Justice part time and graduating in 1977 as the class valedictorian with a BA in Romance Languages.
Also part time, I got a job as Yoko Ono's security chief after John Lennon was murdered. It turned out to be interesting work since, at the time, crazies were coming out of the woodwork to annoy and harass her. Yoko liked to travel and so did I, so one of the great benefits of the job was that I got to go to some very nice places in a very nice way.
Meanwhile, my brothers and sisters were also busy. My brother Eddie decided to call himself Eddie Money and he's been singing, doing shows, and selling records ever since. My sister Peggy became a psychologist and my two other sisters, Pat and Kathy, are both nurses.
By 1989 I had twenty years with the NYPD and it was time to retire since the chiefs had never been too happy about my high-profile, off-duty job, and I had learned by tough experience that unhappy chiefs make for miserable captains. My wife at the time had also had enough of me since, between police work, school, and working for Yoko, I hadn't been home much during our marriage, so she gave me my walking papers and a heavy-duty alimony and child-support bill.
After retiring, I began working as the director of investigations for the Holmes Detective Bureau, an old and well-regarded New York PI agency. I also got a literary agent and began working on my first book, Detective First Grade. My agent sold it to St. Martin's Press a week after I finished it and it was published in May, `93. The book got good reviews and sold well, so I had myself another good part-time career. I wrote another seven books in the next twelve years, a rate of one book every year and a half. All of them feature Detective Brian McKenna or Detective Cisco Sanchez as my protagonist, and although not New York Times best-sellers, they have all received good reviews and I have sold well enough that I now regularly make the USA Today Best Seller List. Detective First Grade, Edge of the City, Hyde, Once In, Never Out, Black and White, and The Two Chinatowns, and The Protectors are all still in print.
I now have a government job working for the Department of Homeland Security, but that will have to end soon because I must get to work on my next book. My hobbies are skiing, traveling, and hanging out with my pals in pubs in town where we spend most of our time lying about our old cases. Our motto is: "The older we get, the better we were."
After getting discharged in one piece in 1968, I did as my father and grandfather had done before me and joined the NYPD. During the next twenty years I managed to get promoted regularly and served in various patrol and detective commands, mostly good jobs in mostly rotten places. I also took advantage of the VA Bill and finally went to college, attending John Jay College of Criminal Justice part time and graduating in 1977 as the class valedictorian with a BA in Romance Languages.
Also part time, I got a job as Yoko Ono's security chief after John Lennon was murdered. It turned out to be interesting work since, at the time, crazies were coming out of the woodwork to annoy and harass her. Yoko liked to travel and so did I, so one of the great benefits of the job was that I got to go to some very nice places in a very nice way.
Meanwhile, my brothers and sisters were also busy. My brother Eddie decided to call himself Eddie Money and he's been singing, doing shows, and selling records ever since. My sister Peggy became a psychologist and my two other sisters, Pat and Kathy, are both nurses.
By 1989 I had twenty years with the NYPD and it was time to retire since the chiefs had never been too happy about my high-profile, off-duty job, and I had learned by tough experience that unhappy chiefs make for miserable captains. My wife at the time had also had enough of me since, between police work, school, and working for Yoko, I hadn't been home much during our marriage, so she gave me my walking papers and a heavy-duty alimony and child-support bill.
After retiring, I began working as the director of investigations for the Holmes Detective Bureau, an old and well-regarded New York PI agency. I also got a literary agent and began working on my first book, Detective First Grade. My agent sold it to St. Martin's Press a week after I finished it and it was published in May, `93. The book got good reviews and sold well, so I had myself another good part-time career. I wrote another seven books in the next twelve years, a rate of one book every year and a half. All of them feature Detective Brian McKenna or Detective Cisco Sanchez as my protagonist, and although not New York Times best-sellers, they have all received good reviews and I have sold well enough that I now regularly make the USA Today Best Seller List. Detective First Grade, Edge of the City, Hyde, Once In, Never Out, Black and White, and The Two Chinatowns, and The Protectors are all still in print.
I now have a government job working for the Department of Homeland Security, but that will have to end soon because I must get to work on my next book. My hobbies are skiing, traveling, and hanging out with my pals in pubs in town where we spend most of our time lying about our old cases. Our motto is: "The older we get, the better we were."
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 24, 2012
I like this author's writing, but I despise his politics. As I have noted before, it offends me a great deal to read books which, in referencing the situation in the North of Ireland, portray members of the IRA as necessarily psychopaths, sexual perverts, or simply as all-around scum (or, as in this case, all of the above), while portraying British intelligence and/or police officers (including the late, unlamented R.U.C.!) as good and decent professionals with the law on their side, striving to do right and bending over backwards to be fair & just. It is especially difficult to take when the author in question is Irish. There used to be a name for this sort of thing- it was called "taking the king's shilling", and those who did so were regarded, rightly in my view, as snitches & traitors. What really infuriates me in this particular case is that Dan Mahoney is an extremely talented & skillful writer, not just some hack pounding out sensationalistic drivel destined for the racks of cheap paperbacks in some hellhole at the margins of the English-speaking world. Without going off into an interminable dissertation on Anglo-Irish relations (or the lack thereof) over the last several hundred years, I would like to state for the record that while I have had great difficulty accepting some of the actions of various elements within the Irish Nationalist community over the years (notably the assassination of Lord Louis Mountbatten by the INLA, which I found both sickening in its callous savagery & appallingly stupid and counterproductive politically), my general rule, in this as in other politico-military matters, is not to question the judgement of the commander in the field, unless that judgement is unmistakably and egregiously incompetent and/or insane. Having said all that, however, I should probably point out that I've never had any time at all for NORAID or similar groups, which are generally a bunch of jackasses & windbags as far as I can tell. Ultimately, my personal views on the "Peace Process", etc. don't matter very much, as I do not have to live in the Six Counties. In other words, whatever is good enough for Martin McGuinness & Gerry Adams is good enough for me. I found it quite amusing that while Mr. Mahoney was quite content to refer to Mr. Adams by his real name in this book, he felt compelled to use the somewhat transparent pseudonym "Martin McGuinn" for the former gentleman. Perhaps he was afraid of some possible retribution, legal or otherwise, for his arguably libellous portrayal of these gentlemen? Dan Mahoney is, despite his obvious talent & skill, the Irish equivalent of an "Uncle Tom". Perhaps he believes that if we all kiss as many British asses as possible, they will stop hating us & no longer consider us to be subhuman. If so, he is grievously misguided. Dan Mahoney can, so to speak, pogue mahone...
January 21, 2016
Very entertaining
November 3, 2020
I'm a regular reader of former NYPD Captain Dan Mahoney. Lots of realism in the investigative detail, set as written in the late 1990's here. It's an action packed thriller which starts off with a fascinating series of scenes in Iceland and Ireland, and winds up at the St. Patrick's Day Parade in New York.
The book must have been written just before the 1998 Belfast Agreement. It draws heavily on "The Troubles" tragedies. In addition to the conflict with the Brits/Protestants there's a major and clear distinction and conflict between the regular, more political IRA which was ready for a settlement by then, while a more violent faction which wasn't.
I don't know if there's any historical basis for a killer in one of the violent factions who has a private side gig as a mercilessly sadistic serial murderer of women and gay men, but that's the antagonist you get here. Many best sellers have such characters, but I'm not an audience for that. The factions I find more interesting (and alarming) are those who allied with Marxist revolutionaries, but there's not of that here.
Despite all the action, it's not a good project for film development because the women are almost all victims, potential victims, or victims of their family life and family history. The author does have his head straight (and his lead character's) on the pivotal issue of religious warfare among Christians. He thinks it was just crazy, and fortunately that's what the sides themselves finally decided by the time this story had made it's way into the bookstores.
The book must have been written just before the 1998 Belfast Agreement. It draws heavily on "The Troubles" tragedies. In addition to the conflict with the Brits/Protestants there's a major and clear distinction and conflict between the regular, more political IRA which was ready for a settlement by then, while a more violent faction which wasn't.
I don't know if there's any historical basis for a killer in one of the violent factions who has a private side gig as a mercilessly sadistic serial murderer of women and gay men, but that's the antagonist you get here. Many best sellers have such characters, but I'm not an audience for that. The factions I find more interesting (and alarming) are those who allied with Marxist revolutionaries, but there's not of that here.
Despite all the action, it's not a good project for film development because the women are almost all victims, potential victims, or victims of their family life and family history. The author does have his head straight (and his lead character's) on the pivotal issue of religious warfare among Christians. He thinks it was just crazy, and fortunately that's what the sides themselves finally decided by the time this story had made it's way into the bookstores.
September 1, 2020
The title of the book is reportedly the motto of the Irish Republican Army, which is the background of this book. Most of the world looks at this action and thinks "what's wrong with these people?" but there are many who go along with it, as described in ugly detail here. The IRA gets entangled with the New York Police Department in this book. As it is a mystery, I won't say anything more about it except that I want to read more books by this author.
February 23, 2008
Another book that I would have never read had it not been for a library patron. This novel was great!
The story concerns a missing irish girl from New York, a bombing of a British diplomat and his wife, and the IRA. Detective Brian McKenna of the NYPD is sure that there is some connection between his missing person and the bombing in Iceland of the British Foreign Secretary.
The case gets much attention and assigned to McKenna because the missing girl's priest brother is a favorite of the Cardinal's.
Very easy to follow yet hard to put down.
The story concerns a missing irish girl from New York, a bombing of a British diplomat and his wife, and the IRA. Detective Brian McKenna of the NYPD is sure that there is some connection between his missing person and the bombing in Iceland of the British Foreign Secretary.
The case gets much attention and assigned to McKenna because the missing girl's priest brother is a favorite of the Cardinal's.
Very easy to follow yet hard to put down.
July 7, 2011
This is a nifty police proceedural type of book. The main character is a smart detective. He tracks down an IRA gunman, who is also a serial killer. The story is action-packed. A really good page-turner beach read.
December 29, 2009
Very fast read!
August 29, 2018
It's been over a decade since I've read this book and bits and pieces will randomly pop into my head. Love it
May 1, 2016
#4 in the Brian McKenna series.
Brian McKenna, NYPD, tracks an IRA bomber, who is also a sexually deviant serial killer, from Iceland to Ireland to NYC.
Brian McKenna, NYPD, tracks an IRA bomber, who is also a sexually deviant serial killer, from Iceland to Ireland to NYC.
May 19, 2019
NYPD Detective Brian McKenna. Action in NYC, Iceland, and Northern Ireland. Serial torturer/killer, once a NYPD officer. Good descriptions of place, characters a little shallow with stereotypical NYC morals.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews