Katie Maguire

On an isolated farm in southern Ireland, a decades-old grave houses the dismembered bones of 11 women. Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire of the Irish Gardai is used to bloodshed, but these white bones speak of unimaginable butchery. Not far away, a young American tourist is at the mercy of a sadistic killer. His tools are a boning knife, twine, and a doll fashioned from rags, nails, and fish-hooks. The murder of his victims is secondary only to his pleasure at their pain.

One cold spring morning in County Cork, two fishermen find a bundle of rags floating in the Blackwater River. It is the bloated body of Father Heaney. His hands and feet are bound, and his neck bears the marks of garrotting wire. Worse still, he has been castrated. When a second priest is found murdered, his body bruised and beaten and the same savage wound hidden beneath his soutane, Detective Inspector Katie Maguire finds evidence of a sinister cover-up at St Joseph's Orphanage.

A young girl has been found in a deserted cemetery. She speaks a foreign language, and she cries for her mother. But nobody claims her. Nobody knows who she is. On the streets of Cork, beggars are being horrifically murdered. But why would anyone want to kill the city's homeless? It's up to DS Katie Maguire to find out. Katie's fiancé is fighting his own battle: against illegal puppy farming, a lucrative black market run by Ireland's most fearsome gangs. When the investigations collide, who will Katie save first?

It started with the judge. He was about to sentence five of Cork's most notorious criminals. But his body has just turned up, beaten and broken, on an isolated road in his burned-out car. Now four members of a rival gang have been shot, and in retaliation three civilians have been blown up. To Katie's horror, Cork is becoming a gang battleground like Dublin. Can Katie save the city? Can she save herself?

DS Katie Maguire is one of Ireland's best detectives. There's no mystery she can't crack with her killer instinct and hunger for justice. Until now...