About halfway through, True Confessions becomes an intriguing read. With the history of the Spellacy brothers' typical escape from an Irish ghetto, via seminary for one, prize-fighting and police department for the other, as backdrop, the mystery of the so-called "Virgin Tramp" murder turns into a fascinating case of detection, as well as an inevitable sequence of revelations about the network of shady and often shared connections that Des and Tom's escape has required of them. By the time the mystery ends in anticlimax, a new fix and Tom's revenge on an old boss from his bagman days, Tom has lost some friends, Des his bishopric, and the reader some of that buoyant sense of voyeurism which mystery creates and which Dunne manages to stir in the middle of his book….

Tom and Des Spellacy seem just a mite more complex than Extension comic strip heroes; and the...