Book Review - The Monk - Paul Williams

Gerry Hutch

This is the story of Gerry Hutch - aka’ The Monk’, one of the most enigmatic figures on the Dublin Crime scene in recent years, and locked in a deadly feud with the Kinahan Cartel. There’s been plenty of newspaper articles about him, but I think this is the first book about Gerry hutch.

I lived and worked in some of the parts of Dublin mentioned in this book, so have always had an interest in the area, even before the infamous Regency hotel attack, when gunmen brazenly walked in and tried to kill a member of the Kinahan cartel. It was brought home to me back then all the more when a man was shot dead a few doors up from us - he might have been in this book but there's so many that you lose track. It's pretty depressing reading at times, especially when people are despatched with alarming regularity. I think Paul Williams did a fine job of not only telling us about the monk and his rise to become a gangland boss, but also about the devastation caused to communities by drugs, which still continues.

Enigmatic is the word for Gerry ‘the monk’ Hutch - I'm not even sure I knew too much about him by the end, though I had a degree of sympathy for him for the carnage visited upon his family. There's some amount of psychopaths in these pages. I became a bit tired of the journalistic style after a while, though I appreciate it couldn't have been written any other way. A few weeks ago, Hutch was arrested in Spain and is now awaiting trial and the Kinahan Cartel are never out of the headlines. ‘The monk’ is a grim but absorbing book, definitely not my usual read but I wanted to understand the feud a bit better. If you like crime books, you’ll like this book about Gerry Hutch.

April 23 Update - Gerry ‘the monk’ Hutch has just been found ‘Not guilty’ by the courts in Ireland and has been released.

Book review - The monk by Paul Williams
352 pages, Paperback

October 22, 2020 by Atlantic Books