The Death of An Irish Tinker (Peter McGarr Mysteries) [Paperback]

Bartholomew Gill (Author)

Book Description

Series: Peter McGarr Mysteries | Publication Date: September 1, 1998

A body is found shackled to the upper branches of the tallest tree in Ireland. The victim is a "Tinker," one of the mysterious class of itinerant travelers who have roamed Ireland for generations. The murder bears all the signs of being the work of Desmond Bacon, "the Toddler," brutal king of Ireland's heroin trade. But who was the deceased and why was he killed? The answer lies with a Tinker woman named Biddy Nevins, who may be the only person able to put Bacon away--that is, if Peter McGarr and his crew can get to her before the Toddler does.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Bartholomew Gill is celebrated for his unsentimental vision of crime on the Dublin streets, and also for his nuanced descriptions of character and Irish places. While The Death of an Irish Tinker is one of the more gruesome installments in the wonderful Peter McGarr mystery series, it is also one of the most powerful in its exploration of the sociopath and drug kingpin known as the Toddler.

The story is revealed by a series of scenes framed in both the present and the past world of the novel. First, Gill shows the making of a killer as he traces the tortured young life of Desmond Bacon, a.k.a. the Toddler. Cutting ahead several years, Chief Superintendent McGarr discovers a dried, nearly mummified corpse high an enormous sequoia on the estate of Eithne Carruthers. Moving back in time again, the reader watches a horrid night in the life of tinker Biddy Nevins. Biddy is a street artist who perfectly reproduces pages from the Book of Kells on the Dublin sidewalks. But on this night her gifted memory becomes a curse; she witnesses the Toddler and his "shades" crush a man's skull under a bus. Before she can fully process what she's seen, she becomes the target of the elusive drug lord who wants to wipe away all evidence of his crime. Biddy flees Dublin, leaving behind her husband and child and the settled life she had begun to craft for herself. But when Biddy's mother shows up in McGarr's office with her scattered version of Biddy's final night in the city, the detective and the young "Rut'ie" Bresnahan begin to weave a trap for the Toddler that leads to a bloody climax.

Gill is a gifted writer who manages to bring a keen understanding of Irish culture to a classic police procedural. Readers are sure to relish the prose and the Irish dialect alongside the chilling tale of a brutal killer. Some other McGarr mysteries include Death of an Irish Sea Wolf, Death of an Ardent Bibliophile, and Death of a Joyce Scholar. --Patrick O'Kelley

From Kirkus Reviews

When the chronology's all sorted out, it looks like this. First, Desmond Bacon, a.k.a. the Toddler, Ireland's premier druglord, stands by and watches as his Bookends, the Hyde brothers, shove Gavin O'Reilly under the wheels of a Dublin bus. (There's talk that Toddler's already plumped up his formidable murder tally by defenestrating traveling musician Paddy McDonagh, but no more of that.) The murder's witnessed by Biddy Nevins, the illiterate, artistically gifted Queen of the Buskers, who hies her family away from Toddler's goons, but not fast enough. Six months later, Eithne Carruthers returns from a vacation to find the skeleton of Mickalou Maugham, Biddy's King, naked and chained to the upper limbs of a soaring old tree on her estate. The next person to die is Toddler's driver Archie Carruthers, who made the arrangements for Mickalou's final resting place. Then the Bookends are killed: one, two, so. And when Chief Supt. Peter McGarr (The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf, 1996, etc.) leans on Cornelius Duggan, Toddler's bent solicitor, to roll over on his boss, Duggan vanishes like smoke. With so many loose ends neatly snipped off, how do you like Biddy Nevins's chances of survival when the tale fades back in after 12 miraculously uneventful years? Considering the elevated body count, Toddler never does seem all that threatening. Maybe it's feisty Biddy, who arms herself more heavily than any clay pigeon; maybe it's the lilt in his language, which makes music of every fatality. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harper Collins (September 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380725797
• ISBN-13: 978-0380725793
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 4.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,167,545 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Grabs you by the throat and drags you through the pages, August 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Death of an Irish Tinker: A Peter Mcgarr Mystery (Hardcover)

If you like your mysteries raw you will appreciate this one. A carefully crafted whorl is begun with the first telling of the story and it soon sucks you into the pages. I figure it's a good book if I have nightmares about it after reading before I go off to sleep. This one did it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not the usual work, but still great., August 23, 1999

By 

S. McHale (Costa Mesa, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Death of An Irish Tinker (Peter McGarr Mysteries) (Paperback)

This book did not have its usual satisfying trappings of character development among McGarr and his staff, nor was there any of the procedural/deduction angle that makes this series so enjoyable. It was heavier on the action (very good at it, too) and there was an interesting emphasis on the Irish Tinker (Gypsy) culture. A very entertaining read but you'll get more out of it if you read some of the other McGarrs before you read this.

Note to Gill, nee, McGarrity: Don't leave us hanging on the Ruthie/Hughie angle! You've got to issue another book in this series!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Strike one Tinker, you strike the whole clan.", April 18, 2003

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Death of An Irish Tinker (Peter McGarr Mysteries) (Paperback)

Investigating the 1984 murder of Mickalou Maugham, a Traveler well liked and admired for his gentleness of spirit and his playing of the uillean pipes, Chief Inspector Peter McGarr focuses on Desmond Bacon, known as the Toddler, who is the sadistic head of the drug trade in Ireland. Mickalou, missing for weeks, has been found dead at the top of a giant sequoia tree in County Wicklow, and Biddy Nevins, his wife, a former addict and sidewalk artist, has fled from Ireland, fearing both the Toddler and the possibility that one or more Garda members may be working with him. Twelve years later, Des Bacon catches up with her, and shootouts, home invasions, car chases, and a high body count result, as he tries to protect his turf and avoid prosecution.

As he does in the rest of this series, Gill develops stories on two levels--the immediate action and excitement of a specific mystery, focusing on some lesser known aspect of Irish life (in this case, the Traveler community), and the stories and relationships of his continuing cast of characters as they develop during the series. Ruthie Bresnahan and Hugh Ward, whose discovery of each other was a huge and often hilarious part of an earlier mystery (Death of a Joyce Scholar), have now had a years-long relationship, which is about to be tested during the action of this novel.

Gill's intensely realized descriptions--of the abuse of a Traveler by the Tod, of an addict in need of a fix, and of a teenager trying to fit in at a dance, for example--make his scenes come alive, while his understanding of the vagaries of police procedure gives a sense of reality to his less than perfect detectives. McGarr is a strong and caring main character whose sense of justice and honor are paramount (even if it means bending the rules), while his well developed cast of likable and amusing subordinates, who continue to grow in successive novels, provides the reader with long-term rewards throughout the series. Mary Whipple