In this state of the nation book, Ryan utilises twenty one voices from a small town to let us know that times aren’t that great. This is peak recession in 2008 and times are hard. Drugs are swilling around the town and the book shows us how they touch so many lives.

The story starts with Bobby and an incriminating photo of him coming out of a brothel on a stag night. He’s married with children with his wife, Triona, is constantly worried about their children and what they might be doing. Mostly she is concerned that they might be dealing drugs.

Like ripples in a pond, the drugs touch lives throughout the town from those who mastermind and obtain the drugs, those who deal and those they cuckoo, those whose drinks they spike and those that are threatened and beaten. It is an epidemic and touches all twenty one.

There isn’t much to cheer about or be be happy over in this book. The people are all troubled in some way but Ryan weaves the many loose ends together into a neat ending but one which leaves a vacuum. The clue to the ending was suggested earlier in the book but of course you don’t know that it is a clue when you read it. It is this delay and holding back from the reader that the many voices are able to achieve as well as demonstrating the impact drugs have on a community.

I much preferred this book to The Queen of Dirt Island.