Being on the Murder Squad is nothing like Detective Antoinette Conway dreamed it would be. Her partner, Stephen Moran, is the only person who seems glad she's there. The rest of her working life is a stream of thankless cases, vicious pranks, and harassment. Antoinette is savagely tough, but she's getting close to the breaking point. Their new case looks like yet another by-the-numbers lovers' quarrel gone bad. Aislinn Murray is blond, pretty, groomed...

Detective Frank Mackey finds himself straight back in the dark tangle of relationships he left behind twenty-two years ago when the suitcase belonging to his first love, Rosie Daly, shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place. The hotly anticipated third novel of the Dublin murder squad.

When newspaper magnate Richard Jewell is found dead at his country estate, clutching a shotgun in his lifeless hands, few see his demise as cause for sorrow. But before long Doctor Quirke and Inspector Hackett realize that, rather than the suspected suicide, "Diamond Dick" has in fact been murdered.

"In the 1880s the Dublin Metropolitan Police classified crime in two distinct classes. Political crimes were classed as 'special, ' whereas theft, robbery and even murder ... were known as 'ordinary.' [In] June 1887, the city swelters in a long summer heatwave, the criminal underworld simmers, and with it, the threat of nationalist violence is growing ... Then the mutilated bodies of a man and a child are discovered in Phoenix Park and Detective Sergeant...

"In 1975, a baby just minutes old is taken from its devastated mother. In 2010, the gruesome corpse of a nun is found in a Dublin public park. Detective Inspector Tom Reynolds and his team are on the scene and he's convinced the murder is linked to historical events that took place in the infamous former Magdalene Laundries, institutions for "fallen women." As Reynolds and his team follow the trail to an isolated convent, everything seems perfectly...