You don’t expect an Irish robbery to go without a hitch, particularly when the plan is to lift St Patrick’s Cross (all five tons of it) from the Rock of Cashel and hold the Government to ransom. Even so, Finn McQuaid and his companions were unfairly handicapped from the start. To begin with, there was Finn’s brother Mickey arriving from the States with $200,000, a gorgeous redhead and the hoods hard on his heels. Then there was the awkward fact that the Government weren’t willing to pay ransom and Finn had to find another bidder for the cross. There was the even more awkward fact that his secretary had had no wages for three weeks and she was a girl of spirit. And there was the little matter of Superintendent O’Malley, a police officer with the disconcerting habit of having premonitory dreams.

Of course, the police didn’t have it all their own way either. They were unexpectedly hampered by the electrical union’s strike and a couple of unheralded interventions from the Finance Minister, who felt that more than Ireland’s historic cross was at stake. How the cross was finally restored to the Rock of Cashel, what happened to two ransoms from two different sources, and how Mickey McQuaid became a married man, add up to one of the most hilarious crime stories since Michael Kenyon’s previous May You Die in Ireland.

 

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