The crime

The book jacket gets right to it: "In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as the Troubles."

The story

The jacket also calls Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland a "stunning intricate narrative," and I won't bury the lede; that is accurate. I gave Say Nothing five stars on Goodreads, and while it's more like four and three quarters, that quarter star is deducted because there are alleys the narrative moves past, glances down, that seem just as fascinating and steeped in bloody rue as the one Radden Keefe's chosen...but that's not really a sporting complaint, exactly. "Why didn't this excellent conveyor of such a complex and fascinating tale write MORE" is a problem you want in this job.