HAPPY ST PATRICK'S DAY - CELEBRATE WITH SOME IRISH CRIME FICTION

In celebration of St Patrick's day, you could do worse than pick up an Irish crime novel.

Here's a few intriguing ones still sitting on the TBR pile......

Pat Fitzpatrick, Kevin Power, Gene Kerrigan, Maggie Gibson, David Pearson and Paul Fitzsimons

Pat Fitzpatrick - Keep Away From Those Ferraris (2014)

Synopsis/blurb.....

Reporter Noel Byrne is about to die. Two snipers hold him in their crosshairs as he delivers his live report from the HQ of HiberBank in central Dublin. His first problem is they will kill him if he doesn't say exactly what they want him to say. His second problem? They both want him to say different things. Keep Away from Those Ferraris is the hilarious story of a country in collapse. A vicious gang of bankers and minor celebrities is desperately trying to salvage one last pay day from the wreckage of the Irish economy. Only Byrne can help them. Only Byrne can stop them. Follow him in and out of madcap scrapes across the boardrooms, bedrooms and bars of Celtic Tiger Dublin. And remember the golden rule when billions are at stake - you trust, you lose.

Paul Fitzsimons - Burning Matches (2018)

Synopsis/blurb.....

Detective Kieran Temple is woken by a 4am phone call. Not unusual, except that this call is from his ex-partner, Mia Burrows. And she’s just killed her boyfriend.

As Temple is compelled to investigate the death, he must do so behind the backs of his superiors and his wife. All evidence supports Mia’s claims, that she was defending herself against a maniac. But as he delves deeper, Temple learns of a complex and dysfunctional relationship, one that’s been manipulated from the start.


While carrying out this unsanctioned and disturbing investigation, Temple’s renewed contact with Mia also forces old feelings to resurface, feelings that once nearly cost him his marriage and his career. And with his gut telling him that Mia’s boyfriend was not the brute he’s being made out to be, Temple is determined to get answers while everyone – including Mia herself – just want it left alone.

David Pearson - Murder on the Old Bog Road (2018)

Synopsis/blurb.....

A woman is found dead in a ditch. As the list of suspects grows, a town’s dirty secrets are revealed. 

It’s a cold winter evening and rain is sweeping in from the Atlantic when a young woman, having braved the weather to visit her sick mother in a remote part of Ireland, comes across an obstacle in the road. She clears the highway of stones from a damaged bridge only to see the body of a woman in a ditch. With no phone reception, she travels to the nearest police station to report what she has found. 

The local Garda waste no time in attending the scene of the crime. The woman is clearly dead, but it needs proper forensics to establish if foul play was the cause. In the meantime, is it not possible that the woman driver was in fact the culprit? She is clearly not telling the whole truth.

A game of cat and mouse ensues when the inquiry is upgraded to a murder investigation. The trouble is, when the victim is recognised as a sex worker, there is no shortage of possible suspects. And few of them, if any, are willing to tell the truth to the police. It will take all of Galway detectives Hays and Lyons’ experience to cut through the web of lies and identify the killer in their midst.

MURDER ON THE OLD BOG ROAD is the first in a series of atmospheric crime fiction titles featuring Detective Inspector Mick Hays and Detective Sergeant Maureen Lyons. 

Gene Kerrigan - The Midnight Choir (2006) 

Synopsis/blurb.....

A sophisticated crime story of contemporary Ireland, The Midnight Choir teems with moral dilemmas as Dublin emerges as a city of ambiguity: a newly scrubbed face hiding a criminal culture of terrible variety. Small-time criminals have become millionaire businessmen, the poor are still struggling to survive, and the police face a world where the old rules no longer apply.

Maggie Gibson - Blah, Blah Black Sheep (2001)

Synopsis/blurb....

Journalist Drew Looney is in a rut, waiting for her job to get better - or at least for a decent story. Then, while covering a mundane deportation, she accidentally stumbles upon something far more sinister . . .

Georgina Fitz-Simons has just overcome a flourishing cocaine habit, but not soon enough to stop her falling foul of gangster Broylan Grillo.

As Drew and George are thrown together by circumstance they become increasingly mired in a dark world of drugs, slave labour, money and murder. Not to mention an inconvenient corpse, a Serbian hit man, and a retired Glam rocker. Somehow they must find a way out - but when the going gets tough . . 

Kevin Power - Bad Day in Blackrock (2008)

Synopsis/blurb....

On a late August night a young man is kicked to death outside a Dublin nightclub and celebration turns to devastation. The reverberations of that event, its genesis and aftermath, is the subject of this extraordinary story, stripping away the veneer of a generation of Celtic cubs, whose social and sexual mores are chronicled and dissected in this tract for our times. The victim, Conor Harris, his killers - three of them are charged with manslaughter - and the trial judge share common childhoods and schooling in the privileged echelons of south Dublin suburbia. The intertwining of these lives leaves their afflicted families in moral free fall as public exposure merges with private anguish and imploded futures.