While he was never a cop, a soldier, or a paramilitary, law-school-trained former English teacher Adrian McKinty grew up surrounded by them in the crackling atmosphere of 1980s Northern Ireland. 

The Sean Duffy series is not a series of novels about The Troubles, but it does very clearly lay out the oft-violent world of Northern Ireland during that chaotic time. McKinty’s lyrical, at times comical, intense, even poetic style feeds the reader a realistic image of 1980s Ulster that far outshines any dreary Hollywood fabrication.

McKinty’s fast-paced storytelling takes readers directly into the fire through the eyes of Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a Catholic police officer in an overwhelmingly Protestant district. He even placed Duffy in a version of the suburban Belfast neighborhood where McKinty grew up.

“I wanted to take a Catholic who was a little more educated and Bohemian, and a cop (!), and plump him down in the middle of a Protestant housing estate in the north Belfast suburbs (on the street, in fact, where I grew up) and just let the sparks fly and see what happened.”

Describing his own childhood, Adrian says, “On one hand there was a real sense of community in that everyone knew everyone else, all the kids played together in the street at big communal games of football etc.; but on the other hand one of my next door neighbors was a paramilitary commander who went to prison for a triple murder (three separate killings, actually, so in effect he was a serial killer.)” 

While they are a series, eight books and growing as of 2025, the Sean Duffy books can each be read as stand-alone crime novels that will give a thrill every time. A reader can pick up any of the titles in any order and not be lost in the soup of bullets and bodies and backstory. 

In addition to the Sean Duffy novels, McKinty has written twenty other thrillers, set in different locations in Ireland, America, the Pacific Islands and Australia. But a theme seems to run through all his works.

“I think that the crucible of war—sort of like the crucible of love—makes for great literature, says McKinty, “As someone who grew up smack in the middle of a decades long civil conflict, but who has written about other topics as well, what do you think? Should we write about what we know, what interests us, or . . . what?”

That said, regarding the technical side of writing itself he adds, “If you read it out loud and it sounds shite it probably is and needs to be re-written. Also—adverbs—please use sparingly.”

In the end, McKinty’s philosophy of storytelling can be summed up as follows: “Just write the book you want to write.  All other concerns are secondary.  Be true to yourself and write the story you want to tell, and please God don’t make it be about serial killers, child abduction, or set in Scandinavia.”