Denise Mina's Slip of the Knife is her third book featuring journalist Paddy Meehan; I had thought it wrapped up a trilogy, but I see on Mina's website that she projects five Paddy Meehan novels. (Of course, said website also says that Slip has yet to be published, so who knows how accurate it is...)
Regardless, this a fantastic novel. I've liked Mina's writing since I first read Garnethill, but I felt like Slip of the Knife is at a whole new level. Mina keeps a nice balance between the struggles of Paddy's quotidian life (she works in the failing newspaper biz) and her tangles with some local members of the IRA. In the process, Mina punctures some of the commonplaces of the suspense genre, as, for instance, when Paddy confronts a member of the IRA, telling him that if they threaten her son, she'll make them pay. It's a rousing speech, but completely deflated by his reaction that everybody slain on both sides is somebody's child, and the so what.
The ending is terrific. Mina manages to do more with moral ambiguity in a few pages than other writers do with whole volumes of grimdark grim-'n'-gritty novels.
As a side note, Ian Rankin also features the IRA in one of the Rebus novels set (IIRC) at around the same time -- I wonder if that was a thing in Scotland at the time, but I'm too lazy to check right now.
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