MURDER ON AN IRISH FARM

The much-anticipated nuptials of DS Macdara Flannery and Garda Siobhán O’Sullivan are rudely interrupted when the best man shows up late and reports a dead body.

In preparation for the blessed event, Dara’s purchased an abandoned dairy farm for their new home. Not to be outdone, Siobhán’s brother, James, has discovered a skeleton in its long-disused slurry pit. The couple’s new neighbors, Gladys and Benji Burns, tentatively identify the body as that of Tommy Caffrey, who vanished the morning of his planned wedding to Gladys, leaving disaster in his wake, 50 years ago to the day. Also missing at the time was 30,000 pounds that Gladys’ brother Alan O’Leary and his friend Howard Dunn had planned to use to start a business. The whole family remains oddly intertwined with Benji’s first wife, Rose, who works with birds of prey, and their adopted son, Joseph, now a potter, who lives nearby. All of them are less than truthful in their descriptions of past events, and Siobhán’s convinced that someone deliberately manipulated her wedding day to commemorate the anniversary of Tommy’s death. When the family sneaks into the crime scene to pay their respects, they find Alan dead in the pit. The fresh corpse and the threats it betokens to the living make solving the mystery even more urgent and even more uncomfortable, since the likely suspects are all family members.

Fans of charming Irish mysteries will delight in the ways this convoluted case ensnares the heroine and her supporting cast.