THE DEATH OF AN IRISH SINNER

A cilicio is a hair shirt for the neck, a collar whose wing nut allows it to be tightened in order to mortify the flesh. But by the time Chief Superintendent Peter McGarr (The Death of an Irish Lover, 2000, etc.) is shown Mary-Jo Stanton’s choked body, it’s beyond mortification. The medieval implement of self-torment that ended her life will become McGarr’s portal to a conspiratorial plot that stretches from Stasi secrets buried in East Germany’s sorry past to Opus Dei, the old-line Catholic order whose founder's life Mary-Jo had chronicled.