GANADOR DEL NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD GANADOR DEL PREMIO ORWELL FINALISTA DEL NATIONAL BOOK AWARD En diciembre de 1972, varios encapuchados secuestraron a Jean McConville, una viuda de treinta y ocho años con diez hijos a su cargo. Nadie dudó, en aquel barrio católico de Belfast, que se trataba de una represalia del IRA. Sin embargo, el crimen no empezó a resolverse hasta 2003, cinco años después de los acuerdos de paz del Viernes Santo, al ser desenterrados los restos mortales de McConville en una playa solitaria. Cuando Patrick Radden Keefe se propuso investigar las ramificaciones de este caso, ignoraba que terminaría escribiendo una crónica total sobre el conflicto norirlandés que ha sido aclamada de manera unánime. Entrevistándose con decenas de testimonios, muchos de los cuales nunca antes habían dado su versión, retrata la profesionalización de las milicias republicanas, la represión del Estado británico, la escalada de violencia y, sobre todo, la evolución ideológica de algunos de sus protagonistas. Por ejemplo, la de Dolours Price, que se enroló en el IRA a temprana edad y estuvo implicada, entre otros atentados, en la ejecución de Jean McConville. Enmarcado en la mejor tradición del periodismo narrativo y la no ficción literaria, es un libro que aúna historia, política y biografía, y que sondea las dimensiones morales de un conflicto que, medio siglo después, todavía levanta ampollas. 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. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dresswith so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes. Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.