Spoilers!
You know that tense feeling you get in your stomach when you see someone going down the wrong path, making bad decisions, even if they’re well-intentioned decisions? Now, imagine a whole book of that and you have Tracey Lange’s second book, 2023’s The Connellys of County Down. It turns out relatively happy in the end, so, there’s that! But seriously, Lange did a great job of creating that tension throughout the duration of her book, almost until the final page. What I particularly appreciated about Lange’s book — in a time where books are out to shock, twist, and convolute the plot to trick the reader (sometimes to good results, and sometimes to their detriment!) — is how decidedly, purposefully no-frills it was. The Connellys are quintessentially Tolstoyan: unhappy in their own way.
The Connellys lost their mother to cancer when the oldest sister, Geraldine, was 16. Even at 13, she became the de facto caregiver and “guardian” for her two younger siblings, Eddie and Tara. That’s because their mother didn’t face her illness head-on and because their father was an absentee criminal. On top of all that, the father abandons them after causing a car crash with Eddie in the car, which resulted in Eddie suffering a traumatic brain injury. Because of adulthood thrust upon her at an early age, Geraldine is prim and proper, faith-abiding, and rule-following. Eddie is insecure about his TBI, and trying to raise his son with the mother, who is addicted to drugs and the party lifestyle, largely out of the picture. As for Tara, we meet her to open the novel: exiting prison after spending 18 months locked up for trafficking in drugs. Oddly enough, one of the police officers who sent her to prison, Brian Nolan, arrives at the prison to apologize to her and he ends up being the one to drive her home. Brian feels like his partner, who is also his uncle, Hank, didn’t need to lean so hard on her in their effort to get the person she was ostensibly trafficking for, Ronald Shea. Brian also put nearly $2,000 into Tara’s commissary account during her imprisonment. It’s clear from the get-go that Brian has a thing for Tara, owing largely to his guilt for the aforementioned and sympathy after reading her file (what the Connellys had been through). Brian also lost his parents at a young age, albeit to an unsolved double homicide.
What also became apparent early-on, but wasn’t fully spelled out until later was that Tara wasn’t actually trafficking in drugs because she was working with Roland and/or because she was Roland’s girlfriend. Instead, Eddie briefly worked for Roland while recovering from a broken arm. When he couldn’t make a particular delivery due to his TBI, Tara stepped in to help him. She was pulled over for a broken taillight, they found the drugs, and then tried to get her to flip on Roland. She never did because she didn’t want to implicate her brother. (I thought she was trafficking drugs, as it were, to help Brian with his TBI, but close enough.)
Tara and Brian aren’t the only ones with complicated pasts and guilt-ridden presents. Geraldine, for all her prim and properness, is “self-medicating” through hoarding. She also works for a payroll company; I’m not exactly sure what she was intending to do, but she was essentially misallocating tax funds. My guess is she was falling behind on her work for the same reason she was hoarding: a sense of overwhelm and losing control — hoarding brought a sense of control back to her life. Tara and Eddie, who live with Geraldine at their childhood home, quickly learn about the hoarding and get Geraldine into therapy. The therapist was quite good with her sentiments, and it made sense once I finished the book and saw the “About the Author” section, as Lange owned and operated a behavioral health-care company for 15 years.
Meanwhile, Tara and Eddie’s relationship blossoms rapidly. They bypass first date, get-to-know you jitters and go straight to sex. After all, as Tara rationalizes later (not that she needs to), Brian already knew mostly everything about Tara and he evened this power dynamic by revealing the history of his parents and Hank’s neediness. Hank and his wife, Rosemary, took in Brian after his parents’ death, then Rosemary divorced him. Brian later realizes how much of a co-dependent, guilt-ridden relationship it had become with Hank. I should say, too, Brian and Tara’s relationship blossoms despite Tara’s parole officer warning both of them off it, and it obviously being ethically dubious, at best, for Brian.
All of these issues collide when Geraldine’s boss learns of the misallocated funds. Hank, who is more dogged about Tara being connected to Roland, is on the case. And worse still, Geraldine did the stupid thing of implicating Tara in her own money scheme by putting the misallocated funds into Tara’s bank account. Everything looks bad. Tara decides, like she did with Eddie, she’s going to take the fall for Geraldine. She’s headstrong, remember, always ready to fall on the sword for a family member. Fortunately, in a more healthy way, she soon realizes she shouldn’t do that. Likewise, Eddie and Geraldine realize they can’t let her do it. Eddie tells Brian the truth about Tara’s “drug trafficking,” and Geraldine confesses to her boss (and Brian; he later jokes Tara’s family needs to stop confessing to him). The boss drops the charges. Eddie further convinces Hank of everything and Tara’s PO since she initially violated her parole when she was thinking of absconding to take the fall for Geraldine. And Eddie for his part finally tells his uncle they need to reconsider their relationship, personally and professionally. The only resolution we didn’t get, come to think of it, was whether the two-year investigation into Roland, which was driving the plot (particularly Hank’s animus), amounted to an arrest and prosecution. I suppose it is heavily implied that, thanks to Eddie’s ex-girlfriend and mother to his son becoming a witness and setting up Roland, Roland is sure to go down now.
Overall, again, I can’t praise enough that Lange had a straightforward story to tell — inasmuch as a dysfunctional family story is “straightforward” per se — and told it exceptionally well. She didn’t need to deviate into unnecessary plot twists or character turns. Avoiding that made for a better, punchier story. I look forward to reading more of Lange’s work.
Milam's Musings 