The Death of an Irish Lover

May 29, 2000
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.