Translator and amateur sleuth Torrey Tunet returns to her home in rural Ireland to find her weaver friend Megan O’Faolain tangled in murder.
Megan arrived in the village of Ballynaugh with high hopes of making a living as a weaver. She was slowly starving, living off whatever game she could shoot, when the local grandee, eminent historian John Gwathney, rescued her by hiring her as the housekeeper of Gwathney Hall. Since Megan was gorgeous and grateful and Gwathney was handsome and wealthy, local gossip filled in the blanks about her official role. Fast-forward to the present: Gwathney is found dead from a shotgun blast to the chest and Megan, sporting mysterious bruises and rumored to be having an affair with potter Liam Caffrey, is a prime suspect. But irrepressible Torrey (The Irish Cairn Murder, 2002, etc.) uncovers some other patterns in the weave, including Gwathney’s last project, recorded in a vanished manuscript, about unlikely survivors in a centuries-old raid on the Irish Coast by Algerian pirates. Gwathney’s will has made his research assistant Roger Flannery, who claims to know nothing about the manuscript, suddenly wealthy. As Inspector Egan O’Hare tightens the noose around Megan, Torrey furiously translates Gwathney’s notes about the project, inexplicably written in Greek.
A passable cozy interwoven with passable history.
