The logic of violence: an ethnography of Dublin’s illegal drug trade. By Brendan Marsh (Routledge, 2020, 144pp, £120.00 hb)

In The Logic of Violence, Brendan Marsh cuts through the ideological thickets of liberal criminology’s drugs research to expose the dark underbelly of the drugs trade in Dublin, seamlessly moving from the everyday practices and narratives of addicted street users to those of their suppliers. Indeed, as the study shows, the life worlds and roles of user and supplier often blur in a frequently chaotic quarter of Dublin’s socio-economic world, where extreme violence, or at least the threat of it, is a daily occurrence. The book draws on the accounts of both men and women but deftly avoids falling into...