DEATH OF AN IRISH MUMMY

Texas-born Dublin limo driver Megan Malone must cope with the decease of an Irish mummy of quite a different sort than the title seems to promise.

Brash American Cherise Williams, convinced that she and her daughters are the rightful heirs to the Earldom of Leitrim, wants nothing more than to extract a DNA sample, or maybe a finger bone, from one of the bodies that rest in St. Michan’s Church to prove her case. Luckily for the dead, Cherise’s attempts to disturb their slumber end when she herself joins them, courtesy of an injection of air that brings on a fatal heart attack. Her daughter Raquel, who finds her mother dead as she enters their hotel room, is totally freaked out, and buttoned-down Sondra and hippie-dippy Jessie, the sisters who shortly join them, are equally distraught in their own ways. Megan’s boss, Orla Keegan, convinced that Megan is cursed after finding “the third body she’d come across in eight months,” immediately fires her, but Raquel’s tears and Detective Superintendent Paul Bourke’s suspicion that Orla herself may be involved in the death soon make Orla realize that she needs Megan even more than Megan needs her. Ignoring the rule that “a chauffeur’s job is to be invisible,” Megan escorts the Williams daughters to Lough Rynn House on the Leitrim estate, where, shortly after the current landholder, Anne Edgeworth, gives them permission to bury their mother in the graveyard, they find her preceded by still another newcomer.

A mild mystery seasoned with puppy love, game humor, and occasional shafts of more pointed wit.