Fenian Street
A Mystery
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- €11.99
Publisher Description
An unsolved murder investigation in 1970s Ireland from “one of Canada’s finest novelists” — Ottawa Review of Books
Shay Rynne grew up in the Corporation Flats — public housing — in Fenian Street, Dublin. He has always toyed with the idea of joining the Garda Síochána, the Irish police. But in the early 1970s, young fellows from the tenements of Dublin have not been welcomed in the police force. When his friend Rosaleen is killed and the case goes unsolved, Shay decides to put on the uniform of a Dublin garda and sets out to find the killer.
The murder inquiry makes an enemy of the detective who failed in the first investigation. Shay knows Detective McCreevy is just waiting for the chance to get revenge. But the violent death of a prominent politician gives Shay the opportunity to prove himself, perhaps even be promoted. Shay works with the lead detective on the murder inquiry and his star is rising, until suspicion falls on a member of Shay’s own family. So Shay is off the case. Officially. Determined to clear his family name, his under-the-radar investigation takes him from an opulent mansion in Dublin to Hell’s Kitchen in New York. And his good friend Father Brennan Burke has some surprising contacts for Shay in the shadowy world of New York’s Irish mob.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of this gripping mystery set in the early 1970s from Arthur Ellis Award winner Emery (the Collins-Burke series), the death of Rosie McGinn, a night clerk at Dublin's Goss's Hotel, prompts Shay Rynne—who has had a crush on the four-years-older Rosie since he was 11 and their families lived in the same public housing project—to join the Garda Síochána. Two detective inspectors decide that Rosie, whose body was found at the foot of the Goss's back stairs, fell down the steps accidentally, despite marks on her neck. Determined to find the killer, Shay and his friend Det. Sgt. Colm Griffith doggedly seek witnesses to what happened. That a number of Shay's relatives have criminal records complicates his quest, but he and Colm succeed in identifying a suspect, shady politician Dermody Risteard. Some months later, Darragh McLogan, a member of the Irish parliament, is found dead behind his house in what proves to be a related case. Meanwhile, bombs go off in Belfast. Emery does a fine job integrating Shay's personal story with the larger Irish political issues of the period. Adrian McKinty fans will want to check this out.
