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rules. Meet me here at eight tomorrow and buy me dinner.”
    I managed,
    â€œLike a date?”
    She was turning on her heel, then,
    â€œWell, it’s hardly like a . . . tragedy.”
    A shopping mall in Nairobi was seized by terrorists brandishing automatic weapons. They screamed at anyone who was a Muslim to leave. A young non-Muslim, an Englishman, managed a few nervous words of Arabic and was released. They then began to systematically murder the remainder. At least fifty people were killed.
    My dinner date with Aine (it was, she said, Irish for Ann) went well. After I asked her to my apartment for a coffee, she said,
    â€œYou just want a fuck.”
    Good Lord!
    Then she added,
    â€œLet’s see if you’re worth screwing.”
    I thought her use of the most basic obscenity was a test and, heavens to Betsy, it certainly was testing, but I felt I could hang in there. Bottom line being that she kept me off balance and that in itself was a rush. She said to me,
    â€œIf a man says no to a woman, she wants to die. If a woman says no to a man, he wants to kill.”
    I told her a partial truth, said,
    â€œThat’s very provocative.”
    And got that Irish look, mix of amusement and derision, as she answered,
    â€œBut provocative to whom?”
    Van Veeteren assumed that in this simple
    way he was obtaining permission to proceed
    from a higher authority and wondered
    in passing if this might be one of the motives
    for all religious activities: the need to pass responsibility on to someone else.
    (HÃ¥kan Nesser, The Strangler’s Honeymoon )
    I was attempting to explain to Aine why I’d started writing a book on Jack Taylor, began with,
    â€œThe guy saved my ass.”
    She was skeptical, said,
    â€œHe stopped a street fight! It hardly merits you devoting your life to him.”
    As I’ve said, Aine was hot but, truth to tell, exasperating. I continued,
    â€œOne book is hardly devotion.”
    She fixed on me that intense no-prisoners Irish gaze,
    â€œYou got some high-flying scholarship to study Samuel Beckett and you’re jeopardizing that to write about a worn-out alky nobody?”
    I tried to explain that mystery and Ireland would be a surefire combination in the States. Then I could, having sold film rights, return to Beckett at my leisure. She was raging.
    â€œAre you three kinds of eejit! A book about a broken-down Kojak in the west of Ireland is going to fly?”
    I said, rattled,
    â€œI know about books.”
    She rolled her eyes, said,
    â€œAnd sweet fuck-all about the real world.”
    A single entry in Jack Taylor’s journal/notes for all of September 2013:
    â€œCuir fidh se anois a chuid gaoither anois”
    (Now it shall please his conscience now).
    Jack’s TV viewing had once been a learning curve all of itself. He asserted that American television was the new literature, that the finest writing was contained in the scripts of
    Breaking Bad
    Game of Thrones
    Low Winter Sun
    reaching back to The Sopranos and excelling onward. But like the darker turn in his psyche, he was now enthralled by
    Hardcore Pawn
    A pawnshop set in the middle of Detroit’s 8 Mile, it was Jerry Springer meets American Horror Story .
    Pawnshops, he said,
    â€œWe’re the new Church of Ultimate Despair.”
    Kennels for the Hound of Heaven.
    A linguistics expert has predicted
    that the next generation of young Irish
    people will speak with American accents.
    I was treating Aine to dinner in Fat Freddy’s in Quay Street. They do a seriously good chili. Aine was having coq au vin, smiling as she said it to me,
    â€œIrish people can never order that with a straight face.”
    We’d just started a carafe of the house wine when I excused myself to answer my cell. Took the call outside on the street amid a riot of hen parties and young people celebrating exam results. The call was from my former tutor in Dublin, who, no frills, asked,
    â€œThe fuck