Irish Studs

by Irving Kaplan

Twenty years after the murder of her father-an agent for British intelligence-and her mother's conviction of the crime, Fiona Cartwright, now a grown woman, returns to Ireland to prove her mother's innocence. In a case long closed and cold as Siberia, Fiona struggles to find clues to the real assassin. She helps thwart the family barrister, Sir Dylan Kerrigan, who is immersed in a treacherous plot to fund the IRA's plan to bomb the London Tower Bridge. Possessed by her need to solve the case, she confronts the secret society of the Shamrock Brotherhood, an organization long part of her father's life as a double agent. The answers are almost in place, but Fiona, faced anew with the tragedy of her mother's death, falls over the edge into drunkenness and despair. Her childhood nanny, Erin-whose lapse of memory prevented her from revealing her secrets is treated with a drug that loosens her tongue. Not until an unexpected accident knocks her unconscious is Fiona transported back to the night of the murder and she discovers the identity of the assassin.

336 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 2000