While this is a chronicle of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, it often reads as a mystery/thriller, historical novel. It’s an amazing account.

In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked men. She was never seen alive again. Who were they and why did they do it? As the story continues, we meet Gerry Adams, Delours Price and her sister Marian, and many others from the paramilitary group known as the IRA aka Provos. We also meet members of the other paramilitary group known as Loyalists or Unionists and the representatives from the British government who controlled them.

McConville, while a tragic victim, isn’t the main character; Delours and Marian are. Readers learn many things about what motivated the sides during these bloody times and the atrocities the two sides committed. Did you know the terrorist Delours was the wife of the actor Stephen Rea? Did you know that both sides had double agents? Did you know that Margaret Thatcher took positions about the Troubles that were highly questionable? Did you know that Adams did questionable things too? I sure didn’t. And how this all related to McConville’s disappearance is a theme that winds in and around this history of the Troubles.

In a sense, the Troubles were a replay of the American revolution, albeit in a more compact form. It’s as if only some of the colonies threw off British rule and then, decades later, a war was fought among the population of the remainder, some now wanting independence and others wanting to remain the English king’s subjects. Northern Ireland’s majority were Loyalists (maybe no longer the case). The IRA called them that, and that’s what they were. The IRA wanted to throw off British rule and join the rest of Ireland; the Loyalists wanted to remain in Great Britain.

Considering the Troubles a fight between Catholics and Protestants is wrong. The war was between those who wanted independence and those who did not. Loyalists or Unionists were more British than the British, it is said. The other side was more Irish than the Irish (not that many in the Irish Republic didn’t help the IRA). That war was, and always will be, secular, not religious. Protestant vs. Catholic is an oversimplification.

But back to the struggle portrayed so well by the author. Delours and her sister were the first to go on a hunger strike after trying to bomb several spots in London and being captured. Their demands were simple: to be imprisoned in Ireland, not Britain. The more famous hunger strike, where ten prisoners died, occurred in Northern Ireland. Those prisoners’ demands were simple too: They wanted to be considered as POWs, not criminals. Delours and Marian didn’t die, but their strike affected their health and lives long afterward. It also made them into reluctant heroes of the fight for independence.

As readers finish this book, they will realize that really nothing was settled. Gerry Adams became an international figure in spite of his transgressions, but the Troubles essentially ended in a stalemate, with an uneasy truce as a result. In a sense, British colonialism still won, while Sinn Fein made the IRA respectable. But the IRA and Loyalists are still there.

The author barely mentions BREXIT. A better analysis of this questionable move by Great Britain to leave the EU should be made from the Irish perspective. It just might destroy the fragile peace of Northern Island, where neighborhoods are still separated in Belfast, forming enclaves that remind me of Cold War Berlin, only with many walls separating people of different sympathies. Northern Island will stay in the EU only if it joins the Irish Republic, which will remain a member. Many in Northern Island, as in Great Britain itself, have second thoughts about leaving the EU, if only from the business perspective. We will see what happens. The secular violence of the Troubles might just awake from its slumbers.