The best feeling a reader and reviewer can experience comes from knowing in the first few paragraphs of a book that one is in the sure hands of a professional and skillful writer about to tell a rip-roaringly good yarn. Seamus Beirne is an exceptionally...

During World War II the population of that part of Ireland that was to become a republic in 1949 was less than three million. So you wouldn’t expect there to be a lot happening that would interest the rest of the world. Not so; the...