Cora Harrison

"Ireland 1923. Reverend Mother Aquinas is buying buttered eggs in the Cork city market at the very moment when the city engineer, James Doyle, is assassinated. Although no one saw the actual killing, a young reporter named Sam O'Mahony is found standing close to the body, a pistol in his hand, and is arrested and charged. Following a desperate appeal from Sam's mother, convinced of her son's innocence, the Reverend Mother investigates -- and, in this...

Cork, Ireland, 1923. When, one wet March morning, Reverend Mother Aquinas discovers a body at the gate of the convent chapel, she immediately sends for one of her former pupils, Police Sergeant Patrick Cashman, to investigate. Dead bodies ar not unusual in the poverty-stricken slums of Cork, but this one is dressed in evening finery; in her handbag is a dance program for the exclusive Merchants' Ball held the previous evening--and a midnight ticket...

"August, 1856. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens are spending the summer at Knebworth House, the magnificent Hertfordshire home of fellow writer Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton, where they are putting on a charity performance of one of Lord Edward's most successful plays, The Lady of Lyon. But the dress rehearsal is disrupted by the discovery of a body lying in the centre of the stage, shot to death. With everyone involved in the play coming under suspicion,...

The Reverend Mother's investigative skills are called into action again when one of her young pupils is found murdered at St Fin Barre's Cathedral. 1920s. Cork, Ireland. The Reverend Mother's Christmas Day festivities are shattered when the protestant bishop of Cork arrives at the convent with terrible news: one of the Reverend Mother's pupils, the troublesome seven-year-old Edna O'Sullivan, has been found murdered in St Fin Barre's Cathedral. Furthermore,...

"Reverend Mother Aquinas must discover who murdered a much-loved priest in the third of this compelling new Irish historical mystery series. Ireland. 1925. Pierced through to the brain, the dead body of the priest was found wedged into the small, dark confessional cubicle. Loved by all, Father Dominic had lent a listening ear to sinners of all kinds: gunmen and policemen; prostitutes and nuns; prosperous businessmen and petty swindlers; tradesmen...

April 1511: Mara is celebrating the christening of her son when she notices that three of her law students have disappeared from the party. The next morning one of them is found dead, and the other two, along with an important legal document, are missing.

The Reverend Mother's investigative skills are called into action when a local tobacco factory burns down and fingers are pointed at one of her ex pupils. 1920s. Cork, Ireland. Early one morning the Reverend Mother receives news of a deadly fire at the local cigarette factory, a place where she'd been so proud that some of her pupils had been given a steady job. In a city full of poverty, unemployment and political unrest, these ex pupils of hers...

February, 1512. Mara, Brehon of the Burren, judge and lawgiver, has been invited to the city state of Galway, which is ruled by English laws and a royal charter originally granted by Richard III. Mara wonders whether she can use her legal knowledge to save the life of a man from the Burren who's been caught stealing a meat pie, but events soon take an even more dramatic turn when the mayor's son is charged with a heinous crime.

When clan leader Garrett MacNamara's dead body is found on the road after a herd of cows has escaped, what was initially assumed to be a tragic case of him being squashed to a pulp by livestock becomes more sinister when a local claims they saw a chain attached to the mutilated body, which has now disappeared. Mara and her scholars must now investigate. Was Slaney, Garrett's wife, threatened by two new arrivals, or is she being blamed for his murder...

It was a macabre ending for an unjust judge: his throat slit by a sharp knife; his body stuffed into a lobster pot and left beneath a powerful jet of water shooting up through the cliffs from the turbulent Atlantic. When Mara, Brehon of the nearby kingdom of the Burren, comes to investigate, she knows that her first suspects have to be the five young men who had received such savage sentences for minor crimes.