[In the following review, Mahoney remarks that Ridgway has "seamlessly" woven "incendiary issues … into a story that is at times excruciatingly suspenseful."]

Grace Quinn is kind and gentle, a harmless woman, really. She lives in rural Ireland in fear of a husband who holds her responsible both for the drowning death of their son Sean and for the homosexuality of their surviving son, Martin. To put it mildly, Grace is long-suffering. For years she has endured appalling verbal abuse and vicious beatings from her often drunken husband—until one night she takes matters into her own hands, climbs into the family car and kills this horrible man in the way he himself once killed a young woman while driving blind drunk on a dark and winding road. Given the circumstances, Grace Quinn's act is, you might say, understandable.

But is the taking of one life by another, no matter the reasons, ever justifiable or forgivable? This is the question at the heart of the Irish writer Keith Ridgway's fine first novel, The Long Falling. Told from the alternating points of view of Grace and Martin in prose that is biblical in its blunt simplicity, Grace's story unfolds against a resonant subplot: Ireland's famous "X" case in 1992.

Raped by an older man, a 14-year-old Irish girl (identified only as X in the press) became pregnant. Alerted to the fact that her parents hoped to take the girl to England for a legal abortion, the High Court of Ireland issued an injunction restraining her from traveling out of the country as well as from obtaining the abortion in Ireland, where a constitutional amendment imposed an absolute ban on the procedure. The injunction was seen by many as a valuation of the life of the unborn child above the life of X, who in her torment had been threatening suicide. In defense of this blameless girl, the Irish people took to the streets in demonstrations against their own Justice Department. After much rancorous public debate on the matter and a legal appeal by the girl's parents, which was financed by the Irish Government itself, the injunction was lifted and the girl was allowed to travel.

It is a testament to Ridgway's narrative skill that he has managed, in his mysterious and sad tale of murder and betrayal, to employ so delicately and without undue preachment this all-too-real case in his fictional exploration of the moral sensibility of the Irish people. Grace Quinn's run from the police occurs at the height of the frenzy over X. At every turn, on television and radio, in streets and in shops, Grace is confronted with angry public discourse over the measure of a human life, the essence of right and wrong. A compassionate detective named Brady, appointed to Grace's case, believes that she was justified in the murder of her husband, knowing as he does of Mr. Quinn's brutality, and struggles with his moral and professional obligation to bring charges against her. Martin, too, suffers his own crisis of conscience when in confusion and frustration he breaks an implicit promise of fidelity to his lover and turns on his mother. Each character's moral quandary is hauntingly echoed by the national mood.

Homosexuality, romantic infidelity, national and familial loyalty, religious hypocrisy, law versus the ambiguities of emotion and compassion, the sometimes cozy, sometimes volatile and always complex Irish triangle of state, church and citizen—these are the incendiary issues that Ridgway seamlessly folds into a story that is at times excruciatingly suspenseful. Where should we draw the line between murder and self-defense? When should the personal morality of a police officer supersede the laws of the state? When does a son surrender his filial duty to his responsibilities as a law-abiding citizen? What part does love play in judgments of right and wrong, good and evil? There are, of course, no easy answers, but these issues demand the sort of measured examination Ridgway so engagingly offers.

When Grace Quinn, rejected by her beloved son, hiding out from the police, says of her dead husband: "I wanted to be free of him, and so I did it, but I'm tied to him now like I never was…. I wanted to spit him out and I swallowed him instead. I shouldn't have done it," her words are a dreadful reminder that much of life's consequences are resultant of vagary and caprice, dictated by the tragedy of the ill-considered action, the irrevocable misstep, the irrevocable moment in which a terrible wrong can seem the only right.