Mention orphans and Prince Edward Island, and Anne Shirley immediately springs to mind. As Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s creation has become an island industry. Mickey Casey – the nasty, drunken, murderous narrator of Michael Hennessey’s new novel The Betrayer – is an orphan from PEI, too. But nobody is going to make a musical out of his story.

Narrator Mickey – or Hugh Michael Casey as he becomes when he starts writing for newspapers – tells us that his mother left him at a Catholic orphanage in Charlottetown when he was a young boy. The nuns cared for him well, and he made friends with Emily Kate Ryan and Billy Williams, whose paths would cross and recross his.

But Mickey is a tough little beggar. He leaves the nuns’ care at age 15 to work for the candy store proprietor who had employed his mother years before. Partly because the man beats him, partly because he thinks the man treated his mother badly, and partly just to rob him, Mickey poisons the man. He gets away with it, and that sets the tone for much of the rest of his life. He runs out on a girl he gets pregnant, he blackmails Billy, and he is the mysterious third man in a murder that sends two others to the gallows.

The “third man” case really happened – the executions were the last held on PEI – and the story obviously fascinates Hennessey. He was also inspired by crime novels: for much of the book, Hennessey has Mickey talk like a thousand other tough guys, describing fights in bloody detail and recounting cliché-filled dialogue.

But The Betrayer is redeemed from second-rate genre status by Mickey’s crisis of conscience. As an aging alcoholic, he wrestles with Catholic theology and his own despair. In the end he must confess all he’s done to God and to Emily Kate, the one person he loves. He loses her, but he doesn’t lose Him, making for a moving finish.

No, The Betrayer wouldn’t make a good musical, but you can almost hear the angels singing at the end.