Washington Post
Ambition is also the byword in "Yeats Is Dead!" a collective work of detection that has 15 Irish writers, ranging from Roddy Doyle to Frank McCourt, contributing a chapter each, as a fundraising project for Amnesty International. The result is a silly and often hilarious mix of episodes, styles and distractions that is less a novel than a tour of the Irish language. From Doyle's opening, where a couple of cops-turned-enforcers bungle a threat and kill a man, to the ending, when the baker's dozen of main characters assemble in a restaurant to clear up the difficulties, this is play at its best.
Each writer seems bent on finding one more tangent that the others have neglected, while cutting down one more suspect that the others have set up for the crime. So one writer picks up on a cop's wife and her woes, while another links her with Mrs. Bloom (the "brains" of the operation who has "tried her hand at most things, but drew the line at honesty"); another reveals some twitching episodes of desire between two police officers; a fourth works out angles on hidden Joyce manuscripts and the meaning of a strange symbol that dominates the novel: Y8S=+! You'll find everything from sex to madness, grief for a dead son to anti-aging cream. There are a few sags in the middle, when the exposition overcomes the laughs, but if you're looking for fun in a good cause, this book is filled with sharp vignettes amid the bedlam.