A Fatal Inheritance

January 4, 2016
The discovery of the body of Clodagh O’Lochlainn on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic, where she’s tied to the stone statue of a god with a noose around her neck, propels Harrison’s solid 13th whodunit set in 16th-century Ireland (after 2015’s Condemned to Death). Just 10 days earlier, Mara, an investigating magistrate and law teacher, presided over a legal case in which Clodagh successfully contested the claims of four of her cousins to her late father’s farm. The cousins asserted that her father promised the farm to them before he went senile, in appreciation of the care they had given him. But the will that the cousins saw locked in a chest of Fergus, another magistrate, had disappeared, and Fergus, whose faculties were in decline, had no memory of making or storing the document, leaving Mara no choice in her verdict. Given this perceived injustice, Clodagh’s cousins are the natural suspects. Harrison again makes the Irish system of justice accessible and intriguing in the service of a clever plot. Agent: Peter Buckman, Ampersand Agency (U.K.).

March 15, 2016
When the reviled Clodagh O'Lochlainn is found strangled and bound with rope to the stone figure of an ancient Celtic god, many superstitious locals believe it to be an act of divine intervention. Still others suspect that the four cousins, who disputed Clodagh's claim to her late father's property, had the perfect motive for a murder most brutal. Or perhaps her abused and beleaguered husband finally decided to do away with his foul-mouthed wife. With rumors running rampant, Brehon Mara, regional judge and magistrate in charge of law and order in the sixteenth-century kingdom of Burren, undertakes the investigation, attempting to solve a crime steeped in rage, disgust, and passionate emotion. The thirteenth entry in Harrison's excellent Burren Mystery series (Cross of Vengeance, 2014) continues to showcase the enlightened legal system of medieval Ireland and the elevated position occupied by educated women in that system.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)