The Going Rate

A screenwriter needs to research Dublin's violent criminals, but falls prey to gangster chic. How deep is too deep for his research? Ireland's Hundred Thousand Welcomes continues to draw immigrants to its faltering Celtic Tiger economy. For those hundreds of thousands of Poles - Catholic, hard-working, white and like the Irish, survivors of an overbearing neighbour - Ireland works. But the Tiger devours too. Barely a week in Ireland. 20-year-old Tadeusz Klos lies in a coma on a rainswept Dublin street. He will not survive. This murder is a tipping point. Gang violence has made Dublin's streets a battleground. Media outrage in Poland and Ireland push the Gardaí to come up with answers. Should the fabled specialist Murder Squad really have been disbanded three years ago? Minogue is suddenly in demand. 'Whatever you need' he is told. With the Polish embassy pressing for answers, Garda brass passes on the pressure to Minogue. Yet Minogue's arrival is already resented in the city Garda station into which he has been parachuted. With little to go on, Minogue soon forms a picture of a chance event: bad timing, a swarm of drunken youths, racist impulses finding an outlet. Hecontinues to call in favours, and slowly that picture begins to cloud and turn to a different story entirely. Tadeusz Klos was no angel either. He was involved in petty crime back in Poland. Ready or not, Minogue is about to drop down a crevasse into Dublin's underworld. Not far from the busy world-class shopping and the crowded nightclubs, is where drug lords and their hired killers rule. 'The Celtic boom may have busted but it has left behind the crime that comes with prosperity. There are no happy endings with John Brady, no pulled punches. There is justice, and heartbreak, and the knowledge that the streets will be just as dirty and dangerous tomorrow.' - National Post (Canada)