Author Description

Crime runs rampant in the ancient, picture-perfect town of Leixleap on Ireland's famed River Shannon. So many thieves have been furtively harvesting the succulent, gourmet-prized and high-priced eels that flourish in the river that there's an Eel Police division whose job is to find and arrest the evildoers. But while poaching may he a matter local lawmen can handle, murder is quite another thing. And when it occurs, a frantic call for help goes out to Dublin and Chief Inspector Peter McGarr. The Death Of An Irish Lover The call has come from a source Peter doesn't much trust: Tim Tallon, a boyhood acquaintance who was once a tactless bully, but has grown up to become - on the surface, at least - a substantial citizen, thanks to his common-law liaison with a well-heeled Belgian woman. The two now own a luxury inn, joined to a lowbrow pub with hot-sheet accommodations for dirty weekenders and their lecherous like. In one of its beds lies a nude couple, so intimately intertwined that one bullet seemingly killed them both. She was Eel Policewoman Ellen Gilday: young, pretty, and recently married, but not to her partner in death. He was Pascal Burke, her boss, a divorced womanizer more than twice her age. It seems that their unsavory affair has been going on for months, both before and after her marriage to a highly regarded local lad, Quintan Finn. McGarr soon finds a witness who may also he a suspect: the charismatic but conniving head bartender, Benny Carson. A former policymaker for the Irish Republican Army, Benny blithely confesses to the double murder as an act of revenge on behalf of the cuckolded Quinton, his nephew. But when McGarr disallows the trickster's "confession," Benny then fingers the infamous Frakes brothers, Manus and Donal, former IRA thugs now employed in eel poaching and various other outside-the-low activities. Benny claims they had involved his hapless nephew in their schemes and done the murders in his behalf. But onc