A Thread of Violence

Starred review from April 24, 2023
In this true crime gem, journalist O’Connell (Notes from an Apocalypse) recounts a year he spent interviewing one of Ireland’s most notorious killers. Socialite Malcolm Macarthur came from landed gentry: confidants described him as unfailingly polite and fond of silk bow ties. But in 1982, with his inheritance dwindling, he planned to rob a bank and murdered two people in pursuit of a car and a gun for the task. After pleading guilty, making headlines, and serving almost 30 years in prison, Macarthur was released and went on to a quiet life in Dublin. O’Connell manages a fascinating portrait of his deliberately elusive subject: “There were places he would much rather have been, but he had done what he had done,” he writes of Macarthur’s attitude toward his time in prison. “The murder had, in a sense, originated in his refusal to relinquish a life of leisurely learning and reading;... in incarceration, he had found something strangely like this freedom.” Swirling together dogged reporting with questions about the media’s coverage of crime, O’Connell manages a gripping account that casts a skeptical eye on its own genre. Even readers put off by profiles of killers will be piqued. Agent: Amelia Atlas, ICM.