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Northern Heist: A Ructions O'Hare Novel

Review

Northern Heist: A Ructions O'Hare Novel

NORTHERN HEIST almost got past me. I’m glad it didn’t. Author Richard O’Rawe is a former operative for the Provisional Irish Republican Army (“IRA”) and did some hard prison time for a bank robbery. While his prior books have been nonfiction, his debut novel demonstrates a dark storytelling ability in the form of a piece of Emerald noir. It is an instant classic.

We learn early on that James “Ructions” O’Hare is planning a bank robbery. That is all we know initially as he begins to prepare for the heist, all the while keeping Panzer O’Hare, his uncle and erstwhile boss, informed. Actually he isn’t quite telling Uncle Panzer everything, a river of deceit and distrust that flows both ways. Ructions doesn’t want his cousin, Finbarr (Panzer’s son), to know about the job or be involved with it in any way. There are a number of reasons for this, one of them being that Finbarr is unreliable. That is the least of his sins, though, as we eventually learn during the course of a cringe-inducing vignette.

"...an instant classic.... O’Rawe takes what might have been in lesser hands a complicated topic --- the street politics of Belfast in the early 2000s --- and renders it comprehensible without sacrificing accuracy or emotion."

The admonition that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead is ever-present in NORTHERN HEIST, as secrets and double-crosses abound. Ructions himself is fairly honest with his fellow thieves, given that he rarely outright lies to them, though he is cheating on his girlfriend with a married woman who also will play an important part in the robbery. We learn the details of the heist gradually against the backdrop of Belfast in 2004 and the uneasy peace that holds tenuously among multiple parties. Various factions of the IRA are neither gone nor forgotten. Ructions has no particular desire to pay tax or tribute to a troublesome IRA bullyboy who is as determined to wet his beak with the spoils of the heist as Ructions is to make sure that the pig doesn’t get so much as a taste.

The story takes an unexpected turn when Ructions endangers himself in order to save one of his co-conspirators. As it nears its conclusions, the book goes from being a dark, gritty work of suspense to a legal thriller where justice ultimately occurs outside of the courtroom. You might see one of the endings coming, but not all of them, yet you will not be able to stop reading just for the joy of seeing how they all happen.

O’Rawe takes what might have been in lesser hands a complicated topic --- the street politics of Belfast in the early 2000s --- and renders it comprehensible without sacrificing accuracy or emotion. The violence is explosive and the language is occasionally coarse, but neither prevents a bit of nobility and redemption to ultimately shine through, sometimes within the darkest of souls. NORTHERN HEIST may be O’Rawe’s first excursion into fiction, but hopefully it will not be his last, and I certainly wouldn’t mind revisiting the characters who make it to the end of this memorable tale.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub on April 9, 2021

Northern Heist: A Ructions O'Hare Novel
by Richard O'Rawe