McGarr and the Legacy of a Woman Scorned is Bartholomew Gill’s seventh mystery featuring Peter McGarr, a detective chief inspector with the Irish police.
What is this book about?
Peter McGarr and his wife Noreen are on vacation in a part of Ireland filled with sunshine, beautiful sandy beaches, and rich black earth. Peter and Noreen agree there is no other place like it in Ireland. Although, McGarr is a bit bored, as any self-respecting, workaholic detective would be. Then, Fionnuala Walton, who is in her sixties and owns a prestigious horse farm on a large piece of prime real estate, is found murdered, shoved down a flight of stairs.
Of course, McGarr is asked by the local police to help with the case, proving once again to the crime-reading fan that a detective should never go on vacation because a dead body is sure to be discovered. (Sometimes you have to love a trope.) McGarr is more than willing to help. He suspects Fionnuala Walton was murdered by one of her sisters, her niece, or one of the Daughertys who own the farm adjacent to Fionnuala’s. An incident that occurred thirty years ago has made the Waltons and Daughertys both allies and adversaries. Fionnuala’s sisters have their own reasons to be angry and bitter about Fionnuala. And the niece is engaged to one of the Daughertys, perhaps shifting her sense of loyalty away from her aunt Fionnuala.
Because the McGarrs aren’t known in this part of Ireland, Peter enlists the help of Noreen by having her rent a room — using her maiden name — in a B & B run by the Daugherty family, whom he considers prime suspects. Noreen, intelligent, quick-thinking, and gutsy, is game. Their vacation is over. The hunt for the killer is on.
Why I liked this book.
Gill has written another moody, suspenseful police detective story. This mystery, like Gill’s others, weaves past events into the present and serves up a twisting plot and an interesting cast of suspects, while DCI McGarr picks apart alibis and uncovers motives until he confronts the killer.
Thoughts about story and character development in Gill’s mystery series . . .
Gill’s seventh McGarr book was published in 1986. I’ve been following a few aspects of Gill’s stories as they develop over time. First, there is McGarr’s drinking. He’s a man who carries a flask and has a bottle in his desk, who can’t enter a pub without having a drink, who accepts a drink while questioning a suspect, and who cozies up with yet another glass at home. For six books, I’ve been wondering if McGarr can keep this up without it impacting his marriage and career. At the beginning of this book, while McGarr and Noreen are on vacation, he has abstained from drinking. Noreen and Peter’s coworkers had begun to worry about his drinking. But as those conversations took place off the page, somewhere between the six and seventh books, we must imagine how those talks went down, which I like.
Noreen has a big role in this book. (So far, in most of the other books, she has remained in the background.) While spying on suspects for Peter, she finds herself attracted to a handsome, flirtatious man who is one of the suspects. She’s twenty years younger than Peter and has begun to wonder if she rushed into marriage with him. He’s a complacent fifty-year-old man who drinks and smokes too much and takes his young wife for granted.
There are still no female detectives in McGarr’s office. There is only Ruthie, who is smart and dedicated, but relegated to her desk. I’m waiting for a female detective. Perhaps in book eight.
[To read my reviews of the first six Peter McGarr mysteries, click here for books one and two, here for book three, here for book four, here for book five, and here for book six.]
Writing Near the Lake 