Dublin psychiatrist Michael Gleeson, the narrator of Finkielman’s exceptional debut, honors his late father’s commitment to the cause of Irish nationalism by treating former IRA members as part of the process required to allow them to move back to their country. Turlough O’Sullivan, a former IRA sniper who walks into Gleeson’s office, claims he shot eight men in Libya two days earlier. He wants Gleeson to check that he’s okay. Gleeson later agrees to go along with O’Sullivan to visit an elderly priest who abused the IRA man as a youth. After O’Sullivan kills his abuser, the bond that complicity in the murder creates leads Gleeson to ask O’Sullivan to help him get posthumous revenge on George Bingham, who evicted thousands of his tenants during the great 19th-century Irish famine, by murdering one of Bingham’s descendants. The ensuing killing spree draws the scrutiny of the police. A thought-provoking plot is matched by vivid prose (O’Sullivan “seemed like a ghost among the living, one of the Sídhe folk, the people of the mounds, who came up from the soil in the old Irish tales”). Finkielman is an author to watch. (Self-published)