1) noun
secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, esp. in order to cheat or deceive others : the armed forces were working in collusion with drug traffickers | collusion between media owners and political leaders.
2) noun
a wrenching sequel to the critically lauded and LA Times Book Prize winning The Ghosts of Belfast: did you read Collusion by Stuart Neville | Collusion is a dark thriller about the deals made and depths plumbed to survive in Northern Ireland.
When Gerry Fegan went away, he was a hero to the cause, an IRA trigger-man who did over a decade of hard time without ever betraying his comrades. But back outside, he’s a shell of his former self, a survivor, now dying a cup at a time every night in the pubs, a hero soldier who committed terrible acts in the name of the cause, becoming an embarrassment and a liability. Calling him damaged would be a gross understatement. Calling him haunted would not. He is.
Haunted by ghosts, the specters of his victims, they follow him everywhere pointing out the objects of their vengeance and Fegan has little choice but to follow their lead. The reckoning he brings clears the tab on old and sometimes buried deeds that he played an unfortunate role in. The Ghosts of Belfast is the tale of the secret war he wages against his former allies and the complications that arise from the stirrings of humanity awakened in him by a woman.
The nexus of cause and action, conviction and execution, and the consequences that will follow inevitably, that’s the field Neville is playing on. Everyone, Fegan included, Fegan especially, has a reckoning ahead, but that glimmer of hope, those forgotten or latent gentler qualities emerging make Fegan’s scorched earth campaign more dangerous, raise the stakes and put so much more on the line than his own life.
Collusion only ups the stakes from there.
With Ghosts, Stuart Neville threw down a daunting gauntlet for his characters and readers alike and with Collusion those same characters and readers who have answered his challenge may reel and stagger at the conclusion, (those who survive), but, (like we expect from the best and most moral-fortitude-challenging writers), the exhaustion will become elation and anticipation of the next, (from James Ellroy’s blurb), “flat-out terror trip.”
Personally, I love the setting and the stakes, but I've had a friend or two baulk calling it too bleak. Where do you stand?
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
