Nicoletta Sarto, is, in 1968, among the few women journalists in Dublin. This is a Dublin my older relatives would recognise, a smaller city, in which transport options are few and social circles are restricted. WHERE THEY LIE is set between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. Nicoletta is a copy-taker and journalist, working the boring night shift at the Sentinel on Burgh Quay. This fictional newspaper resembles the papers of the day, in which court cases reported could see someone sent to hang for murder.
A police station informs Nicoletta that a human skeleton was found by the Creighton family in Sandycove, which sets the intrepid young woman reporter on a chase around the city in search of information. The theatre is still a major entertainment, and the bones are identified as belonging to a missing actress. Jack Bridges, the theatre manager, is devastated at the proof of his wife Julia’s death. Oddly there’s a connection to the Creighton family, who were avid theatre-goers in 1943 when Julia vanished. Gloria Fitzpatrick, a convicted murderer who died in an asylum, was considered responsible. The State did not like to hang women so they were generally allowed to plead insanity. Did Gloria kill Julia? Nicoletta finds some leads.
I greatly enjoyed all the period references, including the WW2 air raid on Dublin and the Apollo 8 astronauts. Well-off people kept a maid in 1968, though Una Little would not today be of school-leaving age. There are many other names of police and connections, but in the office, Barney King is a major figure, a married man who – because divorce was not permitted – doesn’t cavil at affairs. Doubtless, this was the case with young women entering the world of work in previously male-dominated fields. I thought it quite sad as well, that the two young female reporters are pitted against each other for a possible promotion to edit a women’s page. Nobody was treating the male workers that way.
Nicoletta is hard to get to know, but gradually she reveals more of her life. Her Irish-Italian family runs a shop from home, and untypically they are a quiet, sad family, explained by a shadow in their past. The Irish-Italian community is known for catering and big happy family celebrations. Not so for Sartos. Nicoletta isn’t helping by taking a job they see as less than respectable, and now the unpleasantness of murder overlies her writing.
Claire Coughlan has taken a degree in creative writing, and WHERE THEY LIE is carefully detailed and wound up in a tight circle. Some readers will enjoy this approach more than others, but this isn’t a standard crime novel and the author has chosen to make points about women’s history with her fiction. I’ll certainly be looking out for her next book.
An immersive, literary thriller set in 1960s Dublin about an ambitious young female journalist whose investigation of a long missing actress will take her through misty streets and the tangled underworld—and force her to confront the long buried secrets of her own past.
Some stories demand to be told. They keep coming back, echoing down through the decades, until they find a teller . . .
Dublin, 1943. Actress Julia Bridges disappears. She was last seen entering the house of Gloria Fitzpatrick, who is later put on trial for the murder of a woman whose abortion she facilitated. But it’s never proved that Gloria had a hand in Julia’s death—and Julia’s body has never been found. Gloria, however, is sentenced to life in an institution for the criminally insane, where she’s found dead a few years later from an apparent suicide, and the truth of what happened to Julia Bridges dies with her.
Until . . .
Dublin, 1968. Nicoletta Sarto is an ambitious junior reporter for the Irish Sentinel when the bones of Julia Bridges are discovered in the garden of a house on the outskirts of the city. Drawn into investigating the 25-year-old mystery of Julia’s disappearance and her link to the notorious Gloria Fitzpatrick, Nicoletta becomes immersed in the tangled underworld of the illegal abortion industry, stirring up long-buried secrets from her own past.
A beautifully atmospheric, timely thriller, Where They Lie uses a murder mystery as a lens to focus on the long struggle of women fighting to achieve autonomy and succeed in a man’s world.
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