Vet, sleuth convene on rural Irish crime scene

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/05/2023 (1227 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The slimy scion of the richest family in County Kerry is found murdered on the beach, bringing psychologically scarred Dublin veterinarian Dr. Dimpna Wilde back to the town she fled 27 years before — pregnant after being raped, and convinced she’d killed a prized racehorse she loved.

And bringing, too, detective inspector Cormac O’Brien to a village full of feuding families and way more really big secrets than you find in most murder mysteries, though a grand tale is Carlene O’Connor’s No Strangers Here (Kensington Books, 326 pages, $36), published October 2022.

It may be tempting to have a Guinness or two while immersing yourself in this Irish village, but you’ll need a clear head to keep track of all the devious characters and decades of secrets and grudges and evil deeds. A terrific read.

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Teen Olivia rolled the car 20 years ago as she drove three friends home from the pub — when she woke up, the three had vanished without a trace, never to be seen again, no matter the depth and intensity of the investigating.

Of course, podcaster Jenna and ace cold-case police detective Dale simultaneously arrive and have no problem immediately unearthing secrets and sleuthing clues in Claire Douglas’s The Girls Who Disappeared (HarperCollins, 384 pages, $22).

Sure, there’s a shocker ending you should see coming, and it’s an OK mystery, but really, a sharp rookie bobby in her first month on the job would have been able to solve this when it happened.

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Just-promoted detective inspector Jane Tennison spends her first day slogging through a demolished mansion on a building site which contains a (gasp) dead young woman chained to a bed — then complicates things for her furious sexist bosses by uncovering the corpse of a smothered baby.

Lynda La Plante’s Dark Rooms (Zaffre, 336 pages, $22) is indeed a dark tale of ghastly rich people, mysteries of who begat whom, incest, blackmail, murder… all with no guarantees that justice will prevail.

You can picture how a younger Helen Mirren as Jane breaks the rules (and occasionally the law), goes solo, places herself in peril and makes her usual iffy choices in men. And is singularly brilliant.

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An explosion at a dodgy auto repair shop that killed a little boy more than 30 years ago leads to Copenhagen’s ace cold-case unit somehow starting to link grisly murders made to look like accidents and suicides — ooh, how mysterious.

All this happens as Denmark goes into full COVID lockdown and head investigator Carl Morck himself comes under scrutiny for nasty alleged doings many books ago, the clock ticking all the while on more killings.

Jussi Adler-Olsen’s The Shadow Murders (Dutton, 434 pages, $38), published in September 2022, can be confusing but darned entertaining as a small band of women vigilantes avenging themselves on the rude and selfish among us morphs into something much, much — like extra-much — more sinister.

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Hardscrabble rural North Carolina boxer/bouncer/bartender Hudson Miller inherits a scrapyard when his estranged father is murdered — reckon he’ll find out his father was up to more than selling parts from beaters?

Scott Blackburn’s It Dies with You (Crooked Lane, 288 pages, $37), published in June 2022, tells a good little story about decent honest folk just trying to get by, without getting maudlin and without taking the easy route — Hudson is even an adult who can be friends with women, and doesn’t try to bed the grieving single mother.

It’s not violent, for a murder mystery, and avoids pitting its boxer hero against gangs of thugs, instead slowly telling a story, though it all wraps up a tad too easily.

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Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin wonders if anyone’s ever written a murder mystery about cold-case cops who didn’t successfully sleuth an unsolved decades-old murder.