The deaths stack up in the little Irish town, with links to politics, drugs, and lots of other bad lads and crime. Young people often leave Tullyanna in pursuit of adventure, so Sandra becomes no more than a puzzling memory. This was a struggle from the beginning up to the point where I collapsed from exhaustion and skipped to the end. I found the latter stages of the book to be much more interesting but overall, it was a bit of a slog and a disappointment. Brouhaha is an edgy dark comedy, which does for Crime fiction what Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy, did for science fiction and space exploration.

It won’t win the Nobel or the Booker, but it ought to have a fair run at the Bollinger Wodehouse prize. The residents are full of life, with characters ranging from a corrupt local politician, and a retired Garda who coaches GAA. The quotations and references - Springsteen to Yeats - add a lovely depth to this fine piece of work.Back in town, he finds Dove left him a graphic novel he wrote and illustrated, and while initially he is puzzled and disinterested, he begins to realise that the book, about the adventures of a hero named Brouhaha is actually Dove’s way of leaving him clues to what he discovered (as also chastising him for his own actions).

Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Collins Ireland for the opportunity to review this book in my own way. In the fictional town of Tullyanna, which reportedly bears more than a passing resemblance to O’Hanlon’s home town of Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan, Dove Connolly has blown his brains out, while Sandra Mohan went missing years beforehand. Ardal grew up in County Monaghan in Ireland, his father was a TD (MP) in the Irish parliament and a cabinet minister. Throughout the novel I often found myself smiling wryly at the quirkiness of it all, even in the bleakest of moments, and this somehow lightens the whole piece even though the storyline is filled with poignancy. I was therefore over the moon when I started reading and I could actually hear him talking to me in his Irish tang, nuanced language and witty descriptions of real mundane issues in life.Overall, though, this was a book well worth reading with much that I enjoyed even if I didn’t get along with every element. As a murder mystery the book has no problem with providing suspects, but I felt that the book ran out of steam midway through. This was a wee bit heavy going until I managed to settle in to the author's writing style, which did take a bit longer than usual for me.

Can these three unlikely bed fellows work together to decipher the graphic novel and discover the truth about Dove and Sandra, before they become another digit on the body count…. One of the more prominent of well-known Irish comedians in recent times is one Ardal O’Hanlon, who came to prominence in the Channel 4 hit Father Ted. The only novel by a comedian that I remember as being something other than a cash-in was Steve Martin’s The Pleasure Of My Company, a weird, surrealism-inflected novel about a man who has finally won the “Most Average American” competition.The wonderful town that is Tullyanna, fictional but I would imagine to have been made up of maybe one or two real places. Our third main protagonist is Kevin, a retired Garda whose life has been haunted by a young girl's disappearance. I can confirm that he has achieved all of these aims in this off-beat comic satire, and produced a little gem of a book that serves to hold you attention all the way through.