The Kilderry Files

by Maurice Manning

This fast-paced thriller with a rich cast of characters brings us to the heart of Wartime Ireland and into the inner reaches of Catholic politics, a time filled with greed, betrayal, and murder.

440 pages, Paperback

Published November 10, 2017

About the author

MAURICE MANNING, the author of four collections of poetry, was awarded the 2009 Hanes Poetry Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His first book, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, was selected by W. S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Manning, a former writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, teaches at Indiana University and Warren Wilson College.

Reviews

[Ted Farrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fact and fiction are ingeniously blended in the Kilderry Files to produce a complex story of corruption and intrigue. I strongly dislike historical fiction where the boundary between fact and fiction is unclear, but that was never a problem in this story.
In some respects, I really enjoyed it. However, the complexity of the tale got to me at times. It is set in two main time periods, the 1940s and the late 1990S. It comprises at least five separate investigations. It demands a high level of concentration to keep track of all this and I often found myself struggling to remember who was who and when a particular piece of information was revealed.
All in all, an interesting story, but pretty hard going.
Just on a point of detail, I was surprised that the author was six months early on the start of the London Blitz, in 1940.