Faith, Fiction, Friends: "Death Writes" by Andrea Carter

Thursday, December 28, 2023

"Death Writes" by Andrea Carter

Attorney Benedicta O’Keeffe’s friend Phyllis is hosting a literary festival in Glendara on the Inishowen Peninsula of Ireland. Somehow, she’s managed to lure Gavin Featherstone, the reclusive Booker Award winner, to appear and speak at the event. The author is as famous for his reclusiveness as for the first novel that won the award – a first novel never equaled by its successors.

O’Keeffe is worried about her parents, who live in Dublin. A man they met at a grief counseling organization has managed to move into their house, and to their daughter’s eye, acts as if he owns the property. Her significant other, Sgt. Tom Molloy of the Glendara Garda, puts a word in to have the man watched and checked out. That O’Keeffe has managed to convince her parents to stay with her for a few days – and attend the festival – is temporary comfort.

During the event, Featherstone is paired with a short story writer for an on-stage discussion. And not long into it, he keels over and is soon pronounced dead. O’Keeffe is drawn into what becomes a murder investigation, as she represents Featherstone’s estranged wife and grown children. A second, newer will appears. And so do a long line of potential suspects, including O’Keeffe’s friend Phyllis.

Andrea Carter

Death Writes is the sixth of the Inishowen mysteries by Irish writer Andrea Carter. It’s a veritable Agatha Christie-like story, minus the big country house, with a host of suspects, plenty of motives, and characters who don’t like telling the police, or even their friends and attorneys, everything they know.

And wending its way through the main plot is the sub-plot of the man in the home of O’Keefe’s parents. She suspects he’s mispresented himself from the beginning and is something of a grief con artist, and she won’t be far wrong.

Carter studied law at Trinity College Dublin and managed the most northerly solicitor’s practice in the Republic of Ireland. In 2006, she moved to Dublin to work as a barrister and then turned to writing crime novels. She’s published five previous Inishowen mysteries featuring solicitor Benedicta “Ben” O’Keeffe: Death at Whitewater Church, Treacherous Strand, The Well of Ice, Murder at Greysbridge, and The Body Falls.