The death of an Irish sinner: a Peter McGarr mystery

Bartholomew Gill's superb crime series featuring Chief Superintendent Peter McGarr of the Dublin police gets better, richer, and more flavorful with the passage of time. Now the gifted author writing at the top of his form gives us a spellbinding work of mystery and suspense in which guilt lies as heavily on the shoulders of saints as on those of sinners and purity and violence coexist in the depths of the human soul.

A priest approaches Peter McGarr on the chief superintendent's rare day off. The man of the cloth has come to report a murder and to make a bizarre request: Could McGarr have the death officially listed as an accident and then pursue the investigation in secret? The answer, of course, is no.

Perhaps the chief superintendent would have been wiser to have accepted Father Duggan's offer of covert aid, since McGarr's official investigation is being oddly opposed at every turn. Yet the deeper McGarr digs, the closer he is drawn to a secret order of religious zealots called Opus Dei a group devoted to enforcing the Lord's edicts no matter what the cost in money...or human life.

But there are unexpected consequences to looking too closely at the activities of an organization that guards its anonymity as obsessively as it pursues its "sacred calling." More death is doubtlessly in the offing as a web of dark secrets, vengeance, and blood spins out across a century. And suddenly the stakes are being raised to a chilling new level, as the madness reaches out to touch the one place where Peter McGarr is most vulnerable: the precious heart of his own adored family.

Once again author Bartholomew Gill presents a splendid, richly atmospheric warts-and-all view of his beloved Ireland, in a novel of mystery that stands proudly among not only the best of his previous works but among the best crime novels of the past decade.