Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
And what better way to celebrate than with an Irish mystery series (and a bottle of Bailey’s/Jameson/Guiness – your choice)? I’ll be curled up in my reading chair, avoiding my mother’s corned beef and cabbage, and tippling with a little Baileys as I’m working my way through the latest Carlene O’Connor book!
MURDER IN AN IRISH VILLAGE is the first book in a series by Carlene O’Connor, and it’s one of my favorites. I was lucky enough to participate in a signing with Carlene in Chicago and she’s a lot of fun to hang with. Her books are charming, unputdownable, and my mother’s favorites! There are eleven books in the series, which makes it totally bingeable:
In the small village of Kilbane, County Cork, Ireland, Naomi’s Bistro has always been a warm and welcoming spot to visit with neighbors and share a cup o’ tea. But murder has a way of killing business . . .
Nowadays Siobhán O’Sullivan, along with her five siblings, runs the family bistro named for their mother. It’s been a rough year for the O’Sullivans, but it’s about to get rougher. One morning, as they’re opening the bistro, they discover a man seated at a table with a pair of hot pink barber scissors protruding from his chest. With the local garda suspecting the O’Sullivans, and their business in danger of being shunned, it’s up to feisty redheaded Siobhán to solve the crime and save her beloved brood.
Last June I was in Ireland for a week, and picked up DEATH AT WHITEWATERCHURCH by Andrea Carter in a little bookstore in Kilkenny, and have been working my way through the series ever since:
A missing groom—a deconsecrated church—a hidden crypt—a skeleton wrapped in a blanket
When a skeleton is discovered in the hidden crypt of a deconsecrated church, everyone is convinced the bones must be those of Conor Devitt, a local man who went missing on his wedding day six years previously. But the postmortem reveals otherwise.
Solicitor Benedicta “Ben” O’Keeffe is acting for the owners of the church. She is reluctant to get involved, but when Conor’s brother dies in strange circumstances shortly after coming to see her, she finds herself drawn into the mystery. Whose is the skeleton in the crypt and how did it get there? Is Conor Devitt still alive, and if so, is there a link? What happened on the morning of his wedding to make him disappear?
Negotiating between the official investigation—headed up by the handsome but surly Sergeant Tom Molloy—and obstructive locals with secrets of their own, Ben unravels layers of personal and political history to get to the truth of what happened six years before.
I hope you have a wonderful St. Paddy’s Day! Erin go bragh!
-Leslie
Why the hell not?
Leslie Langtry does not like to write bios. Seriously, she’s just not good at it. You’d think that after fifty books, she’d be able to pull off a few sentences, but no, she can’t. It’s very disappointing. At least her books are good, which counts, in her mind, as a win.
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