"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.

 

Related:

 

Death at Whitewater Church by Andrea Carter.

 

Treacherous Strand by Andrea Carter.

 

The Well of Ice by Andrea Carter.

 

Murder at Greysbridge by Andrea Carter.

 

The Body Falls by Andrea Carter.

Some Thursday Readings

 

An Unconventional Christmas Novel (Mystery) by an Unconventional Writer – Martin Edwards at Crime Reads.

 

Nazi-looted Dutch Golden Age painting returned to Goudstikker heir – Gareth Harris at The Art Newspaper.

 

10 Crime Movies Set at New Year’s Eve – Olivia Rutigliano at Crime Reads.

"The Body Falls" by Andrea Carter

Attorney Benedicta O’Keeffe has returned to her practice in Glendara on the Inishowen Peninsula of Ireland, about as far north as you can go in the Irish Republic. She’s spent six months working in Florida; she needed a break and, perhaps most of all, she needed to consider the surprise proposal from Tom Molloy of the Irish Garda. She’s had a young lawyer subbing for her, but it’s now time to come home, resume her practice, and figure out what to do about Molloy. 

A charity cycling event is set to begin, starting in Glendara, and the town and surrounding environs are crowded with cyclists, organizers, and families. It begins to rain, which is not unusual for Inishowen, but it keeps raining. The incessant rain leads to flooding and damage to roads and bridges. The low part of Glendara takes on water as well, and soon the town is fairly isolated.

 

A good friend of O’Keeffe’s, the local veterinarian, is returning late from a call when a body lands on her windshield, falling from a bluff by the road. It had been atop the bluff only a short time; the rain had likely carried it to the edge and then on top the car. The dead man is the major organizer of the cycling event. And while it initially looks like some kind of weird accident, what can’t be explained is what the man was doing on the bluff in a rainstorm near midnight, why his wrists show signs of having been tied from a rope, and what a snake bite is doing on his hand.

 

Andrea Carter

Molloy has his hands full with the flooding and now he has a murder to investigate as well. O’Keeffe, as she tends to do, finds herself talking and counseling all of the various people connected to the man – and any of whom might be responsible for his death – his wife, his twin brother, his old girlfriend, the employee who took the fall for a failed bank, and potentially others. The victim was not a well-liked or well-loved person.

 

The Body Falls by Irish writer Andrea Carter is the fifth Inishowen mystery featuring attorney Benedicta O’Keeffe. Published in 2020, it is (so far) the last, but with a couple of loose threads that suggest a sixth may be coming. It’s a good story, with the added feature of the rain and flooding (which actually did happen in the area in 2017), but there is a considerable amount of narrative development at the end.

 

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 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.

 

Related:

 

Death at Whitewater Church by Andrea Carter.

 

Treacherous Strand by Andrea Carter.

 

The Well of Ice by Andrea Carter.

 

Murder at Greysbridge by Andrea Carter.

"The Well of Ice" by Andrea Carter

It’s a Christmas to remember. Shortly before the holiday, someone torches the much-loved pub in the town of Glendarra on the Inishowen Peninsula in County Donegal. Suspicions focus on the barmaid, who happens to be missing. And then on Christmas Day, when local barrister Benedicta O’Keeffe is out walking with her love interest, Sgt. Molloy of the local Garda, they find the barmaid’s body. The woman has been strangled. 

The arson and murder investigations seem to go nowhere. Too much is swirling around the small Irish town – the pub’s upstairs tenant having heard (and complained about) strange noises in the small hours of the morning; the victim’s husband who seemed to accept his wife’s disappearance as something norm; former residents suddenly returning from abroad; the whiff of eco-terrorism; long-buried family secrets; and the specter of the prison release of the man who killed Benedicta’s sister and was convicted of manslaughter.

 

Andrea Carter

And as she and Sgt. Molloy soon discover, people will say things to an attorney they wouldn’t say to the police. And Benedicta, known as Ben, is pulled deeper and deeper into the mystery.

 

The Well of Ice is the third Inishowen mysteries by Irish writer Andrea Carter. Carter knows well how to arrange a relatively large cast of characters, help you keep all the names straight, and cleverly weave a story that grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. If I have a criticism, it’s that the story paces well until the last 30 pages, and then a lot – and I mean, a lot – happens fast and furiously.

 

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 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.

 

Related:

 

Death at Whitewater Church by Andrea Carter.

 

Treacherous Strand by Andrea Carter.

"Death at Whitewater Church" by Andrea Carter

The Inishowen Peninsula of County Donegal seems a cold, almost desolate place in the depths of winter. The northernmost extension of the Republic of Ireland, it’s most rural with some small towns. When they want a major shopping trip, residents head to the city of Derry. Dublin is a four-hour drive. 

Benedicta O’Keeffe, known as “Ben,” is an attorney. Her practice encompasses the northern part of the peninsula, and it usually involves land sales, probate, court filings, and the basic kinds of law practice. Ben is fine with that; she’s moved here to escape Dublin and the guilt she’s placed on herself for the death of her younger sister. She hasn’t seen her parents in two years. 

 

Inishowen Peninsula

She likes the people she works and lives with, especially the chief policeman, Sgt. Tom Molloy. She and Molloy seems to circle each other, trying to make up their minds if there’s something more to their relationship or not.

 

Ben accompanies a property surveyor to check a deconsecrated church property. An English couple wants to buy it and refurbish it as a holiday home. It’s known as the Whitewater Church; it served the community of Whitewater that all but disappeared in the mid-1980s with the death of the local shipping business. They’re about finished the surgery when the discover the church has a crypt. What remains there might have been were removed with the deconsecration. At the bottom of the stairs, however, they find a skeleton wrapped in a blanket. And it doesn’t belong in the crypt.

 

It might be the body of Conor DeVitt, who disappeared on his wedding day six years before, leaving a hole in his family and the community. What the discovery leads to is a decades-old story of an IRA terrorist bombing, family secrets, and the upending of other crimes both related and unrelated. And Ben finds herself at the center of all of it.

 

Andrea Carter

Death at Whitewater Church is the first of five Inishowen mysteries by Irish writer Andrea Carter. It’s so well written and so intricately plotted that at time I had to remind myself I was reading a crime novel, not a literary story. It requires  close reading to keep track of all the characters, a close reading that will be rewarded. And it’s such a good story that, immediately upon finishing it, I ordered the next four. Death at Whitewater Church is that good.

 

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 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.