Death at Christy Burke’s
A Mystery
-
- $7.99
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
There’s a killer on the premises of Christy Burke’s pub in Dublin, according to graffiti spray-painted on the wall. Father Brennan Burke, Christy’s grandson, is asked to investigate the vandalism. Brennan has been tending bar a bit himself and is not all that keen on probing into the lives of his clientele. But he has little choice once a body is found and the property investigation becomes a murder inquiry.
The pub’s current owner, issuing orders from his cell in Mountjoy Prison, wants the problem solved, and for reasons of his own does not want the police anywhere near the building. Brennan enlists the help of his pal Monty Collins and fellow priest Michael O’Flaherty, and the three of them uncover dark secrets in the lives of the pub regulars, secrets some might kill for.
For Brennan, the murder investigation is overshadowed by even more ominous events in Belfast, events that may be coming home to roost in Christy Burke’s. Sinister figures are spotted in and around the pub, people are being followed in the street, and Brennan comes to possess explosive information that he cannot reveal to security forces or to anyone else. Brennan is compelled to take a hard look at Irish history and his family’s place in it, and Michael’s sunny optimism about his ancestral home is about to be sorely tested, when an act of violence in Northern Ireland sends out shock waves that reverberate all the way to Dublin.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Emery's sixth mystery (after 2010's Children in the Morning) makes excellent use of its early 1990s Dublin setting and the period's endemic violence between Protestants and Catholics. When Fr. Brennan Burke was 10 years old, Burke's father, an IRA member, fled Ireland at gunpoint for the U.S., taking along his family. Despite this fraught history, the younger Burke has often visited his Irish birthplace. In 1992, he and his fellow priest, Michael O'Flaherty, are visiting Dublin at a sensitive time: American evangelist Merle Odom, who disappeared in Belfast, is believed to have been taken prisoner by the IRA, though no one has taken credit for the kidnapping. When Burke and O'Flaherty meet up at a Burke family business, Christy Burke's pub (named for Burke's grandfather), they learn that someone has painted graffiti on the tavern's front wall suggesting that it's a hangout for a killer or killers. Fascinated with crime-solving, the two priests get on the trail of the vandal who's been defacing the pub. Emery blends the plot lines convincingly and resolves them realistically.