The Final Silence, by Stuart Neville
Given the very dark nature of the stories in Stuart Neville's Belfast novels (of which The Fatal Silence is the 4th), that title suggests a very bleak story indeed. And there's plenty of darkness in the tale that unfolds from the slow death of Raymond Drew (of natural causes) at the beginning. But there is a kind of open-ended, skeptical moment of optimism that provides a breath of hope. Though before that, Drew's niece discovers and opens her uncle's journal, a true Pandora's box of evil deeds done in the past and evil consequences to come in the present. The whole Belfast series is haunted (almost literally) by the Troubles (each book in a different way). Here, the calm and prosperous surface of things fails to contain the eruption of violence that has its source in the politics of the past as well as the kind of violence that will always be with us. The violence engulfs everyone touched by the diary, including the niece, her parents, and the still-surviving main ...