{read: Irish thriller} Ratlines by Stuart Neville

Ireland is one of the countries that offered asylum to the Nazis after WWII, but now, just weeks before JFK is scheduled to visit, someone is killing them. Albert Ryan, a man who fought in the war and now works for Ireland's Directorate of Intelligence, is tasked with getting to the bottom of it. But what he finds is that it's not quite as simple as it seems. He gets pulled into a tangled mess of intrigue and the bodies start to pile up. Can he find a way out?

I had discovered Stuart Neville years ago with his first novel, The Ghosts of Belfast, which featured an IRA hitman who is haunted by the 12 men he killed and, once released from prison, sets out to kill those who had engineered their deaths. (That's the first of a trilogy.) This standalone didn't disappoint, and the end is especially chilling. Neville excels at creating damaged male characters who fight against right and wrong, all the while knowing that a "normal" life will always evade them and death is just around the corner.

Ratlines by Stuart Neville (Soho Crime, 2013)
My rating: 4 stars