(Adams has long denied ever being in the IRA.) In Dolours Price and Jean McConville, Keefe says he saw the makings of an incredible story. He began researching the McConville case more than six years ago, after he stumbled across an obituary in The New York Times for Dolours Price, a former IRA member who had participated in the group’s infamous 1973 bombing in London and who, in a late-in-life reversal, took aim at Gerry Adams, the former longtime head of the Sinn Fein political party, for his time as a leader of the IRA.

The book often reads like a novel, but as anyone familiar with his work for The New Yorker can attest, Keefe is an obsessive reporter and researcher, a master of narrative nonfiction. Say Nothing is compulsively readable, equal parts true-crime thriller and political history.

The story of McConville, the Irish Republican Army militants who abducted her and the search for truth is the subject of a new book, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (out today), written by New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe. The audio files, they believed, could help solve the case. The detectives were investigating the death of Jean McConville. The recordings were part of an oral history conducted by Boston College featuring direct participants on all sides of the Troubles who unburdened themselves of stories of mayhem and carnage they had participated in. They had flown across the Atlantic to retrieve audio recordings kept under lock-and-key in a secure university-library enclosure called the Treasure Room. She had been disappeared and likely killed, one of the 3,600 casualties to result from Northern Ireland’s infamous three-decade period of violence and upheaval known as the Troubles.įorty years later, a pair of detectives working for the Serious Crimes Branch of Northern Ireland’s police service arrived at the campus of Boston College. McConville’s children would never see or hear from her again.

One evening in late 1972, a young mother of 10 named Jean McConville was taken from her home in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, by four men and four women in masks.

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe