Come Through Your Door
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4.5 • 28 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Against the stark beauty of southwest Ireland, Carlene O’Connor’s atmospheric County Kerry mystery series continues, and this time veterinarian Dimpna Wilde must reckon with a stalker whose obsession has turned deadly . . .
“Isn’t this how every ghost story begins?”
The roads around Dingle are whisper-quiet in the small hours of a rainy night, empty of the tourists who throng the town by day. As she and her assistant, Patrick, drive home after an already traumatic day, Dimpna Wilde isn’t expecting to see anyone, let alone her employee, Niamh, standing in the road, dressed in a nightgown and soaked to the skin.
Dazed and distraught, Niamh passes out after muttering incoherently, and at her apartment, Dimpna and Patrick make a grisly discovery. There’s a dead woman in Niamh’s bed, shot in the head, a hunting rifle beside her. When Niamh comes to, she has no memory of the day’s events, and no idea of the woman’s identity. All she can tell Detective Inspector Cormac O’Brien with certainty is that for weeks, she’s felt like she was being watched.
Suspicion falls on Niamh’s new boyfriend, Mark Gallagher, who her friends have not yet met. But as Dimpna and Cormac try to track him down, they realize there’s no evidence Mark Gallagher ever even existed. All of Niamh’s texts and photos of him are missing or deleted, and he has no social media presence. What lingers is a nagging unease, especially when they learn of another, similar murder years ago—another woman found shot to death in her bed, a woman who had complained of being stalked, just like Niamh.
As Dimpna delves deeper into a twisting case, she feels someone watching her too, targeting her business, her animals, her family—even her sanity, willing to do anything to stop her from disclosing a terrifying truth . . .
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
When a new murder revives talk of an older case, a trusty veteran investigator must turn her bucolic Irish village upside down in this tightly wound mystery. In the rural town of Dingle, murder becomes personal for whip-smart veterinarian Dimpna Wilde when Niamh, her trusty assistant, is found wandering disoriented in a bloody nightgown, unable to explain the dead woman in her bed. Niamh can’t remember what happened the day before, leaving the loyal, headstrong Dimpna to solve the case herself. With her evocative depiction of Dingle’s small-town life and its complicated web of relationships, Carlene O’Connor breathes spine-tingling suspense into this charming village. You can feel how the anniversary of an unsolved murder hits hard for such a tight-knit community, sometimes threatening to break down long-held trust in favor of paranoid suspicion. Come Through Your Door beguiled us with its charm—and then scared us silly.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A baffling murder investigation unearths the spotty history of an Irish psychiatric institution in the entertaining if overbusy latest entry in O'Connor's County Kerry series (after You Have Gone Too Far). As Irish veterinarian Dimpna Wilde walks in her father's funeral procession, she notices that her employee, Niamh Dowd, who was supposed to be there with her boyfriend, Mark Gallagher, is missing. Hours later, Dimpna discovers a blood-soaked, amnesia-stricken Niamh on the side of the road and takes her home. When they arrive, they find a woman's corpse in Niamh's bed, but Niamh swears she has no idea how it got there. Meanwhile, Mark is nowhere to be found, and Dimpna can't find any record of his existence. Detective inspector Cormac O'Brien eventually takes up the case, identifying the dead woman and noticing unmistakable similarities to the recent unsolved murder of a psych ward employee who was investigating a serial killer before she died. O'Connor relies on a few too many false identities to fuel the book's preponderance of third-act plot twists. Still, she's a pro at using cliffhangers to pull the plot forward, and as O'Brien's investigation deepens, fascinating details emerge about the history of Ireland's treatment of the mentally ill. Despite some bumps, this should satisfy the author's fans.