She Is The Law

The latest in Cora Harrison’s ‘Burren Mysteries’ series is LAWS IN CONFLICT (Severn House), which features the sixteenth century Brehon judge, Mara, and is now available in paperback. Quoth the blurb elves:

February, 1512. Mara, Brehon of the Burren, judge and lawgiver, has been invited to the magnificent city state of Galway, which is ruled by English laws and a royal charter originally granted by Richard III. Mara wonders whether she can use her legal knowledge to save the life of a man from the Burren who has been caught stealing a meat pie, but events soon take an even more dramatic turn when the mayor’s son is charged with a heinous crime. Sure there is more to the case than meets the eye, Mara investigates ...

  Here’s hoping that has whetted your appetite, because there’s another Burren Mysteries novel due later this year, THE CROSS OF VENGEANCE, which sounds utterly fascinating. To wit:

When Mara attends mass at Kilnaboy Church, it is just another duty in her busy life as Brehon of the Burren, responsible for the maintenance of law and order in the kingdom. The church holds an important relic: a piece of the true cross itself, housed inside a round tower and heralded by the huge two-armed stone cross on the church gable. Hence, on this special day, the church is packed with locals, as well as pilgrims from all over Europe. But when fire attacks the tower where the precious relic is housed, and Mara then discovers that one of the pilgrims is a disciple of Martin Luther and a hater of such sacred relics, a Spanish priest threatens the might of the Inquisition and a German traveller takes refuge in the church. However, the next morning, a naked body is found dead, spread-eagled in the shape of a cross, on top of one of the tombs on the hill behind the church. Was it one of the true pilgrims who killed him? Or perhaps the priest of the parish, helped by his grave digger? Or was it even the innkeeper, whose business has been ruined now that the relic, which attracted visitors from all over Europe, has been destroyed? Once again, it is Mara’s task, along with that of her law-school pupils, to investigate and uphold the power of the law ...

  THE CROSS OF VENGEANCE will be published in September. Will it be the novel that finally puts Cora Harrison on the radar of those good people who compile the shortlist for the Irish Crime Novel of the Year? Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell …

Review: COLD SPRING by Patrick McGinley

‘No one lives in Leaca anymore,’ begins Patrick McGinley’s provocative novel, but even in 1948, the year in which the novel is set, Leaca was dying on its knees. Scrubbed bare by sea and wind, gutted by emigration, the tiny Donegal village had always taken pride in its sense of community – until the day their venerable elder, Paddy Canty, is discovered strangled to death. When the gardaí fail to apprehend the killer, the men of the village take the law into their own hands.
  Cold Spring, then, is framed as a revenge thriller, although it is considerably more complex than such novels tend to be. For one, the reader is as ignorant as to the identity and motive of the killer as are the villagers are, which makes Cold Spring a pleasingly intricate blend of ‘whodunit’ and ‘whydunit’. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Patrick McGinley asks penetrating questions about the nature of justice, and the reader’s complicity in creating fiction’s illusion of justice, as the villagers plot to avenge their murdered neighbour.
  McGinley’s Bogmail (1978) is one of the few Irish crime novels to bear comparison with Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967), but Bogmail’s whimsical and absurdist treatment of the genre has been replaced here with a gimlet-eyed obsession with truth and righteousness. Can murder ever be justified? The novel’s arc incorporates a kind of Socratic dialogue between the avengers’ ringleader, Muriris, and the unbiddable Tom Barron, fleshing out the arguments with references to an Old Testament-style eye-for-an-eye retribution, the difficulties faced by the State-sanctioned executioner Albert Pierrepoint, folk memories of the murder of an absentee landlord’s feckless agent, and a rather radical interpretation of Brehon law.
  If Cold Spring is to some extent a novel of ideas and simultaneously a vigorous interrogation of the genre, it’s also a lament of sorts, a paean to a time, place
and people that no longer exist. The recently arrived Englishman Nick and his partner Sharon – a failing writer and successful artist, respectively – are our eyes and ears, reporting back on the hauntingly stark beauty of mountain, lake, bog and shore. On one level, McGinley convincingly paints a portrait of a long-lost idyll derived from Rockwell Kent and John Hinde, but this particular vision of a quasi-mystical Ireland has been poisoned by insularity, history and hubris.
  Don’t be fooled by rural Donegal setting: the fatalistic tone is one of pure noir. – Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Independent.

  Over at the Irish Times, COLD SPRING was reviewed by George O’Brien.