It doesn't take long before Maura feels at home in a small
village in County Cork, Ireland. After growing up in South
Boston without a lot of money, she was surprised when her
Gran asked her to visit Ireland with their last bit of
money. She ends up getting more than she bargained for on a
lot of counts: a murder mystery, and interesting people who
knew her Gran with stories to share.
Connolly does a nice job of bringing the people and the
landscape of the village to life. Maura soon finds herself
a part of the community with a place to stay, a car to
drive and a job pulling beers at the local pub. She's
making friends and finds herself over her head in a mystery
that involves a body in a bog and more contemporary
mischief.
Connolly's personal history with Ireland and love of the
land comes alive. Make sure to read the acknowledgements
section to find out more. Connolly's knowledge and passion
for Ireland make this story almost more one of self-
discovery
than of mystery. That said, I did have some quibbles with
this new series starter. While Connolly flourishes with
setting, the mystery is less engaging and practically
nonexistent. Also, it takes a long time for anything to
happen mystery wise.
The story has a strong cast of secondary characters
including Maura's landlord, Bridget Nolan, Mick, and Rose,
who looks to Maura as a big sister. I was charmed by the
setting, and it made me want to visit Ireland, so I kept
reading. Hopefully future books in this series won't need
any more set-up, so the murders can start sooner. If you're
looking for an interesting book set in Ireland, BURIED IN A
BOG might
work for you. But if you're looking for a strong cozy
mystery, pass this one by.
National bestselling and Agatha Award-nominated author
Sheila Connolly introduces a brand-new series set in a small
village in County Cork, Ireland, where buried secrets are
about to rise to the surface...
Honoring the
wish of her late grandmother, Maura Donovan visits the small
Irish village where her Gran was born—though she never
expected to get bogged down in a murder mystery. Nor had she
planned to take a job in one of the local pubs, but she
finds herself excited to get to know the people who knew her
Gran.
In the pub, she’s swamped with drink
orders as everyone in town gathers to talk about the recent
discovery of a nearly one-hundred-year-old body in a nearby
bog. When Maura realizes she may know something about the
dead man—and that the body’s connected to another, more
recent, death—she fears she’s about to become mired in a
homicide investigation. After she discovers the death is
connected to another from almost a century earlier, Maura
has a sinking feeling she may really be getting in over her
head...
Excerpt
Maura Donovan checked her watch again. If she had it
right, she had been traveling for over fourteen hours; she
wasn't going to reset it for the right time zone until she
got where she was going, which she hoped would be any minute
now. First the red–eye flight from Boston to Dublin,
the cheapest she could find; then a bus from Dublin to Cork,
then another, slower bus from Cork to Leap, a flyspeck on
the map on the south coast of Ireland. But she was finding
that in Ireland nobody ever hurried, especially on the local
bus. The creaking vehicle would pull over at a location with
no obvious markings, and people miraculously appeared. They
greeted the driver by name; they greeted each other as well.
Her they nodded at, wary of a stranger in their midst.
She tried to smile politely in return, but she was
exhausted. She didn't know where she was or what she was
doing. She was on this rattletrap bus only because Gran had
asked her to make the trip?just before she died, worn down
from half a century of scrabbling to make a living and keep
a roof over her granddaughter's head in South Boston. Now
that she thought about it, Gran had probably been planning
this trip for her for quite a while. She had insisted that
Maura get a passport, and not just any passport, but an
Irish one, which was possible only because Gran had filed
for an Irish Certificate of Foreign Birth for her when she
was a child. What else had Gran not told her?
And what else had she been too young and too selfish to
ask about? Gran had never talked much about her life in
Ireland, before she had been widowed and brought her young
son to Boston, and Maura had been too busy trying to be
American to care. She didn't remember her father, no more
than a large laughing figure. Or her mother, who after her
father's death had decided that raising a child alone, with
an Irish–born mother–in–law, was not for
her and split. It had always been just her and Gran, in a
small apartment in a shabby triple–decker in a
not–so–good neighborhood in South Boston.
Which was where Irish immigrants had been settling for
generations, so Maura was no stranger to the Boston Irish
community. Maybe her grandmother Nora Donovan had never
shoved the Ould Country down her throat, but there had been
many a time that Maura had come home from school or from
work and found Gran deep in conversation with some new
immigrant, an empty plate in front of him. She'd taken it on
herself to look out for the new ones, who'd left Ireland
much as Gran had, hoping for a better life, or more money.
The flow had slowed for a while when the Celtic
Tiger—the unexpected prosperity that had swept the
country and disappeared again within less than a
decade—was raging, but then it had picked up again in
the past few years.
Maura suspected that Gran had been slipping the lads some
extra cash, which would go a long way toward explaining why
they'd never had the money to move out of the
one–bedroom apartment they'd lived in as long as Maura
could remember. Why Gran had worked more than one job, and
why Maura had started working as early as the law would let
her. Why Gran had died, riddled with cancer after waiting
too long to see a doctor, and had left a bank account with
barely enough to cover the last bills. Then the landlord had
announced he was converting the building to condominiums,
now that Southie was becoming gentrified, and Maura was left
with no home and no one.
It was only when she was packing up Gran's pitifully few
things that she'd found the envelope with the money. In one
of their last conversations in the hospital, Gran had made
her promise to go to Ireland, to tell her friend Bridget
Nolan that she'd passed, and to say a Mass in the old church
in Leap, where she'd been married. "Say my farewells for me,
darlin'," she'd said, and Maura had agreed, although she had
thought it was no more than the ramblings of a sick old
woman. How was she supposed to fly to Ireland, when she
wasn't sure she could make the next rent payment?
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