After the twin successes of his transgressive western tales Days Without End and A Thousand Moons, Sebastian Barry’s ninth novel sees a return to the territory of his Booker-shortlisted The Secret Scripture: Ireland and the bitter persistence of memory.

Tom Kettle, a retired policeman living in the annexe of a Victorian castle on the craggy Dalkey coast, is surprised one evening to find his tranquillity disturbed by two officers from his old force. In a transfixing opening chapter, with a storm raging, we discover that Tom might have information relating to a decades-old case involving two paedophile priests. The cold case that turns warm is, of course, a crime novel cliché, but Barry makes it sparkle and shapeshift in a book more concerned than the standard police procedural with the ‘sad stations of memory’.

The full picture takes a while to be revealed. With his ‘large, bandy body, and his belly, and his beat-up boxer’s face’, the moral and humane Tom is the epitome of the good cop led astray. After the visit from his old colleagues, Tom becomes inexplicably suicidal, leading to