Boston, Massachusetts is sometimes said to be the city where Irish politics found their fullest expression. According to John Gregory Dunne's novel [True Confessions], Los Angeles is the city where Irish-American cops and clerics were or possibly are most on the make and take. In fact, Mr Dunne does not quite name LA, though the delimiting geography is all there; and the time remains vague—a year or so after the Second World War. Tom Spellacy, a retired policeman, is looking back from now to then….

There is enough plot here for several seasons of an ethnic cop television series. But Mr Dunne keeps it all jumping; he also keeps counterpointing his already pithy paragraphs with terse one-liners: "He rubbed his ass." "Tom Spellacy lit a cigarette." "The bathroom door opened."

The effect of it all has been such that in the present in which Tom recalls the...