The Death of an Irish Lover: An Inspector Peter McGarr Mystery Hardcover - 2000

From the publisher

Crime runs rampant in the ancient, picture-perfect town of Leixleap on Ireland's famed River Shannon. So many thieves have been furtively harvesting the succulent, gourmet-prized and high-priced eels that flourish in the river that there's an Eel Police division whose job is to find and arrest the evildoers. But while poaching may he a matter local lawmen can handle, murder is quite another thing. And when it occurs, a frantic call for help goes out to Dublin and Chief Inspector Peter McGarr.

The call has come from a source Peter doesn't much trust: Tim Tallon, a boyhood acquaintance who was once a tactless bully, but has grown up to become - on the surface, at least - a substantial citizen, thanks to his common-law liaison with a well-heeled Belgian woman. The two now own a luxury inn, joined to a lowbrow pub with hot-sheet accommodations for dirty weekenders and their lecherous like. In one of its beds lies a nude couple, so intimately intertwined that one bullet seemingly killed them both.

She was Eel Policewoman Ellen Gilday: young, pretty, and recently married, but not to her partner in death. He was Pascal Burke, her boss, a divorced womanizer more than twice her age. It seems that their unsavory affair has been going on for months, both before and after her marriage to a highly regarded local lad, Quintan Finn.

McGarr soon finds a witness who may also he a suspect: the charismatic but conniving head bartender, Benny Carson. A former policymaker for the Irish Republican Army, Benny blithely confesses to the double murder as an act of revenge on behalf of the cuckolded Quinton, his nephew. But when McGarr disallows the trickster's "confession," Benny then fingers the infamous Frakes brothers, Manus and Donal, former IRA thugs now employed in eel poaching and various other outside-the-low activities. Benny claims they had involved his hapless nephew in their schemes and done the murders in his behalf.

But once again, nothing is clearcut. What seems to be an unraveling mystery is merely a wad of loose ends. There are unexplained oddities, like the seven-year-old girl prowling outside Tallon's inn with a beeper. The testimony of the maid who found the bodies is hopelessly skewed. And more suspects keep turning up as McGarr finds that the victims might have enraged not only their spouses but also eel fishermen, both legitimate and otherwise, and environmentalists, who have long suspected the two were on the take.

In this clever and beguiling novel, Bartholomew Gill not only creates a stunningly complex puzzle but also gives the reader an authentic look at the charms, the challenges, and the fascinating contradictions that exist in present-day Ireland. The result is a work that is both informative and unfailingly entertaining.