"Six months after the events of In the Woods, Detective Cassie Maddox is still trying to recover. She's transferred out of the murder squad and started a relationship with Detective Sam O'Neill, but she's too badly shaken to make a commitment to him or to her career. Then Sam calls her to the scene of his new case: a young woman found stabbed to death in a small town outside Dublin. The dead girl's ID says her name is Lexie Madison--the identity Cassie...

Shocked to learn that a loyal advisor to the king has been murdered in an enemy fortress and that the chief suspect is scheduled to be brutally executed, Fidelma is challenged to sift through overwhelming evidence to clear the suspect's name and identify the true killer.

In a quiet Dublin suburb, within her pristine home, Eleanor Costello is found hanging from a rope. The autopsy reveals poorly healed bones and old stab wounds, absent from medical records. A new cut is carefully, deliberately covered in paint. Eleanor's husband, Peter, is unreachable, missing. Detective Chief Superintendent Frankie Sheehan would have been more than happy to declare it a suicide, but can't help but feel that something doesn't fit....

"This holiday trip to Dublin had been very hard on detective Kathleen Doyle's husband--although he was making a monumental effort to disguise this fact--an unless she very much missed her guess, it was all somehow connected to the grisly murder on the station-house steps. That, and an African cab-driver who wore a jaunty tam o'shanter"--Back cover.

Lucy Stone investigates the murder of a barkeep who not only cheated but was rumored to have connections with the Irish Republican Army.

On her trip home from Rome, Sister Fidelma unexpectedly finds herself in Genoa, where she learns of the imminent death of a former mentor who imparts information about a conspiracy that is triggering murders and a vicious war.

As Fidelma of Cashel and her companion Eadulf prepare for their upcoming nuptials, the festivities are interrupted by the murder of the fanatical Abbot Ultan and accusations against another guest, the King of Connacht, in a mystery set in seventh-centuryIreland.

When her brother the king barely survives an assassination attempt, Fidelma, her companion Eadulf, and bodyguard Gormaan journey into dangerous enemy territory to discover who is behind the plot and why.