Say Nothing

In December 1972, masked intruders took Jean McConville from her Belfast flat. She was a 38-year-old widow with ten children. Her neighbors all understood that the I.R.A. was behind it, but fear and suspicion were so thick in the community that nobody would say so aloud. Her fate stayed a mystery until 2003, five years after a peace agreement had settled over Northern Ireland, when a set of human bones turned up on a beach. Her children were sure it was their mother once they heard that a blue safety pin was fastened to the dress. With so many young children, she had always kept one close for nappies and torn clothes.

Patrick Radden Keefe uses her disappearance as the entry point into the wider story of the Troubles. He follows a society torn apart by a brutal guerrilla war and shows how little of that war's legacy has ever been faced honestly. The violence marked the McConville children for life, but it also marked former I.R.A. members, many of them bitter that the peace fell well short of a united Ireland. Some of them began to ask whether the killings they carried out were acts of war at all, or just murder.

The cast is vivid and morally tangled. There is Dolours Price, who was barely out of her teens when she was planting bombs in London and helping target informers for execution. There is the feared I.R.A. commander known as The Dark. There are the covert operations and dirty tactics of the British Army. And there is Gerry Adams, who helped broker the peace and then disowned his own I.R.A. past, in the eyes of his hardline former comrades a betrayal.

Keefe draws on interviews with people from both sides of the conflict and builds his account with the pacing of a novel. The result is a story of passion, loyalty, revenge and grief, told through the lives of the people who lived it and are still living with it.