Extraordinary reporting, unusually honest sourcing, and a final movement that gives its least-evidenced conclusion the most dramatic position in the structure.

Start with the notes at the back, before the book proper. Not because they contain spoilers, they don't, but because the whole enterprise depends on whether you trust the sourcing, and Radden Keefe has done something unusual: he lays out exactly where each contested claim comes from, including the Boston College oral history tapes whose legal collapse is itself part of the story. There is a great deal of that apparatus and it is honest apparatus. I wish more journalism-turned-history bothered. Most doesn't.

The book itself is very good and I want to be precise about why, since "gripping" explains nothing. It is structured as a disappearance. Jean McConville, ten children, taken from a flat in Divis in December 1972, and then the disappearance is not solved for a very long time, and in the meantime the book builds the world in which such a thing was ordinary. Dolours Price. Brendan Hughes. The hunger strikes. Adams, always at the edge of the frame, denying.

What Radden Keefe grasps, and what a lot of Troubles writing does not, is that the interesting question isn't who did it. It's what happens to people who did things in their twenties for reasons that made complete sense at the time, and who then find themselves at sixty inside a peace they never voted for, watching the man who gave the orders lay wreaths. Price's disintegration is the real spine of the thing. The section on her force-feeding in Brixton is hard reading and it earns its hardness.

My reservation, and it's why this is an eight. The final movement, where he assembles the case for who actually pulled the trigger, is delivered with a narrative flourish that the rest of the book has been too careful to allow itself. It is dramatically satisfying. It is likewise the most thinly sourced part of the argument and it is given the strongest position in the structure, which is a rhetorical decision rather than an evidential one. I'm not saying he's wrong. I'm saying the book's own standards should have made him say it more quietly.

There's an absence too. Loyalist violence is present but thin, and unionist experience barely registers as an interior at any point. He would answer, fairly, that this is a book about one community and one disappearance. Fair. But a reader arriving with no background will leave with a picture missing about half of the thing, and the book's confidence never signals that gap.

A colleague in history, whose period this is and mine isn't, delivered the standard professional grumble about journalists writing history and then admitted he had read it in two days. That's roughly where I am. It does something monographs don't, which is make you feel the moral weather.

Eight. My copy went to a neighbour who grew up in Andersonstown and she hasn't returned it or said anything about it, which I have decided not to ask about.