FOUR SHOTS IN THE NIGHT

A swift-paced exposé of the Northern Irish Troubles and the fraught interactions among British intelligence and the Irish Republican Army.

Hemming, the author of Agent M and Agents of Influence, delivers a true-crime tale narrated with the skills of a whodunit pro. The author opens with the murder of a British agent, his body left beside a country lane. The British agent was also a member of the IRA, with responsibilities that included storing weapons used in the war against Britain. He was killed, Hemming charges, by another IRA member, possibly on the orders of Martin McGuinness, who became a prominent politician in Northern Ireland and was famously granted an audience with Queen Elizabeth II, an interaction that speaks to the well-worn observation about Northern Irish politics: “If you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on.” The killing, notes the author, was marked by “savage intimacy,” carefully planned from start to finish; the IRA leadership surely knew about it beforehand, but MI5 may have had an inkling before the fact as well. Hemming writes confidently of matters that the IRA has surely tried to keep silent—not just political murders but also everyday tactics, such as the use of dog and horse transports to move weapons around, those transports being difficult for British canine sniffers to expose. One extraordinary revelation is that British intelligence had so thoroughly infiltrated the IRA that the organization was brought to an effective standstill, its stalwarts not knowing whom to trust. One British handler reveals that military intelligence wanted to force the IRA out of the military and into the political arena, against the wishes of the British government—even if Margaret Thatcher, Hemming notes, did authorize secret negotiations to curb the bloodshed.

A riveting tale of bad guys all around, engaging from start to finish.