Amazon.com Review
Chief Inspector Peter McGarr is back, this time to investigate a double homicide in Leixleap, a village on the River Shannon. The murder takes place in a fancy inn owned by Tim Tallon, a loudmouth who bullied McGarr when they were boys. Tallon calls McGarr to the murder scene to beg a favor of his old friend--that McGarr keep the murder investigation hush-hush. The naked victims--so intimately entwined that one bullet seems to have killed them both--were officers in Leixleap's Eel Division, a department with a directive to hunt down poachers. The female officer was a belle, recently married but not to her partner in death. The male is her boss and twice her age, a local tomcat.
Beneath a moody winter sky, author Bartholomew Gill brings to life this engaging Irish fishing village, where I.R.A. thugs routinely steal eels from harvesters. A charismatic but cunning bartender clues McGarr in on the scene. The villagers all know each other's business, so gossip penetrates fact in interesting ways. McGarr weaves together fragments--observations, opinions, guesswork--and has a knack for knowing when people lie or tell less than they know. Fans of the Peter McGarr mystery series already know that they can expect a vivid portrait of contemporary Ireland, at once realistic and just far enough removed from reality to feel like a vacation. Newcomers will be happy to enter the lives of McGarr and his familiars. Death of an Irish Lover is an entertaining good time. --Kathi Inman Berens
From Publishers Weekly
Beautifully written, brilliantly plotted and cleverly concluded, Gill's 14th Peter McGarr mystery (following 1997's Death of an Irish Tinker) is an uncommon pleasure. Ireland's chief homicide cop responds to a call from Tim Tallon, whom he used to know as a schoolyard bully, but who's now an innkeeper in the Shannon River town of Leixleap (literally, "Salmon Jump"). Two bodies have turned up in a guest room at Tallon's inn. To make it worse, the victims, Ellen Finn and Pascal Burke, are "eel police"Demployees of the Fisheries Board whose job was to prevent eel poaching. Worse still, Finn, a young married woman, was found nude atop her boss, Burke, a noted local "swordsman." McGarr soon assembles his team and discovers that the artfully arranged murders are not what they seem. But the suspects, motives and dangers are all plentiful. A scorned lover? Eel poachers? The cuckolded husband? Tallon, the bullying inn owner, or his Belgian "wife"? The canny bartender, a former IRA section chief and a graduate of the Maze Prison? Insightful and patient, McGarr pursues the elusive truth with a combination of official and unofficial police methods that, however unorthodox, proves effective. Ireland, rich in history, rife with divisions and riddled with contradictions, provides a glowing background to this deeply absorbing novel, but the complexity of the characters and the subtlety of the author prove most satisfying. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
