A combo whodunit/soap opera? Good/bad idea?

There are certainly things to enjoy here. Aoife McMahon is definitely a narrator to whom I could listen reading other books. And Dervla McTiernan can write. It's just that there is way too much of almost everything here: so much so that the book gets mighty confusing and the plots/subplots/red herrings become so twisted around that by a certain point I lost track of what was up and what was down. I felt kinda like Alice, falling down the rabbit hole. Down, down, down! The soap opera and the whodunit vie for dominance throughout, and IMHO this is not a healthy competition for an author to set up. I couldn't begin to tell you all of the characters and all of the plots. Just too much. Even the basic story is complicated, spanning over twenty years of people living in or near Galway, on the west coast of Ireland (a perfectly wonderful place to visit, BTW: go there soon). There are drug deaths, murders, long-simmering hatreds, garda (police) departments that just cannot keep up with the chaos that is happening on the streets of their communities. I know that I sometimes complain about the lack of humor in novels. Rightly or wrongly, I feel that a little bit of humor truly helps break the tension that is being generated by the plot(s), and it also serves to make the characters feel more like fleshed-out people. In ten and a half hours of listening to this book, I found exactly one moment of fun: the crotchety/crazy/psychopathic/demented old lady named Domenica Keen is a true laff riot, as they used to spell it in Vaudeville days. And Aoife does a perfect job with this voice, down to the last inflection. But truly, that is the only moment of fun in the entire book. The rest of it, and there's a lot, is about 100% suffering and pain. Now I know quite a number of Irishfolks, and I have spent three months there over about twelve years. I do know how much they have suffered, from a variety of misfortunes so severe that a weaker nation would collapse into an ocean of its own tears. Nonetheless, the brands of suffering here are so extensive that almost any character could burst into a flood of tears at any moment. Child abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, horrible poverty, disease, death, the fear of going to Hell...I'm a nervous wreck just thinking about all of it, and I am merely scratching the surface. A moment to breathe, please? A bit of comic relief? See what I mean? Too much misery. Almost like reading Dickens, although certainly not that far down the line. So, as usual, you must make up your own minds about this book. I think I have been fair about the positives and the negatives, insofar as that is possible. For myself, when Aoife McMahon narrates another audiobook, I will look very closely at it, hoping that her serious talents might be well-employed again. And as for Ms. McTiernan, perhaps not so much.