A County Kerry Novel Series

With the haunting, moody prose of Tana French and the compulsive storytelling of Dervla McTiernan or Ann Cleeves, bestselling author Carlene O’Connor lures readers to a remote village on Ireland’s southwest coast, where winding windswept roads open to spectacular views of rugged cliffs against immense, lonely beaches…and some fear a mysterious cult could be connected to the disappearance of a young pregnant woman.

After two pregnant women in Dingle who have never met each receive a chilling email warning them that they’re in grave danger, the two decide to meet each other to figure out what is going on. But when one of the mothers, Shauna, a deaf woman, arrives at their meeting place at the village Spring Festival, she fears a trap and hurries off to meet the couple who plan to adopt her baby.

Meanwhile, Dimpna Wilde has her hands full with lambing season and keeping track of her father, so she’s grateful for the help of a well-meaning ten-year-old boy, Dylan, at the veterinary clinic. But when the lad goes missing after going into a bog on a dare with two other boys to search for a “monster,” she is desperate to help find him.

After the adoptive couple are discovered tied up in their home, telling a terrifying story of a deaf pregnant woman being abducted by a man wearing a butterfly mask, Detective Inspector Cormac O’Brien and Detective Sergeant Barbara Neely fear a repeat of a disturbing case from twenty years earlier, when a charismatic leader calling himself the Shepherd, lured poor pregnant girls into his enigmatic cult. Though allegations of baby smuggling were never proven, he’d been put away on other charges. But then they learn that the Shepherd has recently been released from prison.

Trapped in a cold, dark room with a frightened boy, Shauna fears for their lives as well as that of her unborn baby. If she has any chance of getting out and away from the Moth Man, as she calls her abductor, she’ll have to figure out the truth behind who she really is and how that connects to the ordeal she finds herself in now. But time is running out and her baby will be born soon . . .

In late summer, the Dingle peninsula is thronged with tourists drawn to County Kerry’s dark mountains and deep, lush valleys. For Irish vet Dimpna Wilde, who has returned to run her family’s practice after years away, home is a beautiful but complicated place—especially when it becomes the setting for a brutal murder . . .

In Dimpna Wilde’s veterinary practice, an imminent meteor shower and the watch parties that are planned all over Dingle have taken over the usual gossip. But there are also matters nearer at hand to discuss—including the ragtag caravan of young people selling wares by the roadside and the shocking death of Chris Henderson, an elderly local, in a hit-and-run.

Just hours before his death, Henderson had stormed into the garda station, complaining loudly about the caravan’s occupants causing noise and disruption. One of their members is Brigid Sweeney, a beautiful young woman who later turns up at Dimpna’s practice, splattered in blood with an injured hare tucked into her jacket, claiming that a mysterious stranger has been trying to obtain a lucky rabbit’s foot.

Matters worsen on the night of the meteor shower when Dimpna finds Brigid’s dead body tied to a tree, a rabbit’s foot tied to her severed left hand. The rabbit’s foot, the severed hand, the coinciding meteor shower—the deeper Dimpna and Detective Inspector Cormac O’Brien investigate, the more ominous the signs seem to be, laced with a warning that Dimpna fears it will prove fatal to overlook.

Readers of Tana French, Lucy Foley, and Dervla McTiernan will be spellbound by the USA Today bestselling author’s unsettling, atmospheric suspense novel set in Ireland’s rugged countryside. Combining an eerie and atmospheric backdrop with compulsively taut plotting, a twisty mystery unfolds as an Irish veterinarian contends with life, death, and the fatal secrets at the heart of her small oceanside community…

BookBub Best Mysteries and Thrillers of Fall

On a rocky beach in the southwest of Ireland, the body of a wealthy racehorse owner Johnny O’Reilly has been discovered. In a town like Dingle, everyone knows a little something about everyone else. But dig a bit deeper, and there’s always much more to find. And when Detective Inspector Cormac O’Brien is dispatched out of Killarney to lead the murder inquiry, he’s determined to unearth every last buried secret.

Dimpna Wilde hasn’t been home in years. But faced with a triple bombshell—her mother is rumored to have been in a relationship with Johnny, her father’s dementia is escalating, and her brother is avoiding her calls—Dimpna moves back to Dingle to clear her family of suspicion. And as she takes over the family practice, she finds herself in a race with the detective inspector to uncover the dark, twisting truth behind murder, no matter how close to home it strikes…

“Compelling… this is the best of O’Connor’s Irish mysteries to date.”—Kirkus STARRED REVIEW