With Our Blessing

February 25, 2019
Det. Insp. Tom Reynolds, the hero of this taut series launch from Spain (The Confession), and his fellow members of the Dublin Murder Squad investigate the murder of the Reverend Mother Attracta, whose mutilated body was found in a city park. Attracta was the head of a convent in the remote village of Kilcross. Now housing only a handful of nuns, the convent was once one of the notorious Magadalene Laundries. Begun as charitable refuges for indigent women, the laundries quickly became state-sanctioned dumping grounds for unwanted children rife with abuse, including black market adoptions. Before the inquiry is fully underway, Det. Laura Brennan discovers that her family has a dark connection to the convent. While a winter storm isolates Reynolds and his team, a second victim—the parish priest with sins to hide—is murdered. Reynolds, facing a crisis of his own, must accept that the killer may be closer to home than he cares to acknowledge. Spain’s fully realized characters, brisk plot, and clear-eyed view of Ireland’s painful past engage readers from the start. Agent: Nicola Barr, Bent Agency.

Starred review from March 15, 2019
Magdalene laundries were a form of convent-run work houses in which imprisoned Irish women labored from the nineteenth century through 1996. Most of the women?some of whom served what amounted to life sentences?were unmarried mothers sent to the convents by their families, clergy, or even the courts, ostensibly to wash away their sins. The children of the women, among them this reviewer, were given up for adoption or kept in the laundries as further free church labor. This novel centers on a former Limerick, Ireland, Magdalene laundry that comes to police attention when one of its nuns is found crucified in a park. The horror appears at first to be payment for the cruelty routinely meted out by the woman, but as the investigators dig deeper, clues emerge that complicate the obvious scenario, and there's a new serious crime to investigate. Are the crimes related? Who could commit such atrocities? And are today's clergy answerable for the actions of their long-ago brethren? Spain's The Confession (2018) was a best-seller in Ireland, and this well-crafted, riveting work is surely destined for similar success, and it deserves a wide readership in this country as well. For more on the laundries, try the documentary Sex in a Cold Climate and the movie The Magdalene Sisters.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)