In August of 1998, police in Omagh, a market town in Northern Ireland, received word that a bomb would go off near the courthouse. Saturday shoppers were herded away from the building, whereupon the bomb exploded in the area they had been moved to. An IRA terrorist splinter group comprising diehard nationalists opposed to the Good Friday ceasefire, calling itself the Real IRA, took responsibility for the bombing and the 29 resulting deaths. In his third novel, Snyder (also author of two memoirs, Of Time and Memory
and The Cliff Walk) proposes an alternative hypothesis: that the bomb was planted—and the false warning was deliberately given—by renegade British operatives trying to turn the Irish against the IRA. Into their scheme wanders an American woman, 42-year-old Nora Andrews, who has fled to Ireland after discovering that she is pregnant and that her husband, Steven, is having an affair. When she naïvely lets drop that she saw a British soldier with an infant running away from the bomb site before the blast (thereby indicating that he knew what was going to happen), she sets in motion a manhunt for the soldier, the rescued mother and baby and for Nora herself—all are valuable witnesses sought by both the British and the IRA. While on the run, Nora examines her marriage and the person she has become, and discovers new truths about her life. Reminiscent of the work of the late Brian Moore, with the addition of a climactic scene that could have come straight from Junger's The Perfect Storm, this competent—albeit derivative and inflammatory—thriller delivers some exciting moments as well as insights into the mind of a woman who slowly realizes her own complicity in the wreck of her marriage. (June)
