DEATH OF AN IRISH DRUID

Motives abound for the death of a wealthy man.

Megan Malone has become known as the “murder driver” because, in her capacity as a driver for a limo service, she’s found more than her share of bodies. After she picks up her American friends Rafael and Sarah Williams at the Dublin airport with her two Jack Russell terriers, she takes them to St. Brigid’s holy well, rumored to help couples get pregnant, as they’re hoping. They’re shocked but not surprised when one of the dogs alerts them to a man floating dead in the holy well. The woman who works at the visitors’ center is sure the body must be Seamus Nolan, a member of the Anglo-Irish nobility known as the Irish Druid DS Patrick Doyle of the Garda, horrified to have caught a Murder Driver case, is eager to write it off as an accident. Megan, who doesn’t agree, learns more about Nolan, who’s been rewilding, converting large parts of his enormous estate from farming to woods. When Raf and Sarah urge her to investigate, Megan finds Nolan’s bike hidden in a hedge near the well. Megan befriends Nolan’s teenage daughter, Aisling, who’s overrun by reporters when she comes to see where her father died. Driving Aisling back to the estate, which is even larger than she imagined, she meets Aisling’s unfriendly great-uncle, Adam Nolan, who wants to sell the place, which is currently the subject of a court case over who’s to inherit it—Seamus had been fighting to overturn the requirement that it pass to his closest male relative instead of his daughter. Money is always a motive for murder, of course, but between the battle over the inheritance and the opposed parties involved in the rewilding controversy, Megan has plenty of other options.

An entertaining mystery with plenty of quirky characters.