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DEATH AND NIGHTINGALES by Eugene McCabe Kirkus Star

DEATH AND NIGHTINGALES

by Eugene McCabe

Pub Date: March 1st, 2001
ISBN: 1-58234-237-7
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Glasgow-born writer McCabe debuts here with a haunting novel of love and deception set in rural 19th-century Ireland.

On May 3, 1883, Elizabeth Winters awakes to face a day destined to be far from ordinary. She begins by reading a chemist’s manual describing the effects of poisons, then checks to see which she has in stock. A young beauty of 23, Beth lives with her Protestant father Billy Winters. Actually, Billy isn’t really her father, although it was some time after he married the late Catherine Maguire that he became aware of the fact. A well-to-do landlord, Billy comes from a family that invaded Ireland with the king’s men 300 years ago and put Catholics like the Maguires off their own land. His wife, whose family tree went back much farther, looked down on him until the day she died, and his daughter has ample cause to hold him in the lowest esteem herself. Beth has made up her mind to run away with Liam Ward, one of her father’s tenants, who is secretly involved with the Fenian cell that recently assassinated the British viceroy in Dublin. She’s told Liam about a trunk of gold hidden in the house, and so the two of them figure that in two days’ time they can be on a ship bound for America and a new life together. But Billy has recently been visited by a secret government agent from Dublin who asked some very pointed questions about Liam and, hoping to turn him into an informer, let on that there were some unsavory rumors circulating about the precise nature of Billy’s relations with Beth. Straight answers are notoriously hard to come by in Ireland, but deceptions on this scale could hardly be looked for in Dante’s Florence. How easy is it to be caught in someone else’s net when you are still casting your own?

Brilliant, richly conceived, and perfectly narrated with the suspense of a good thriller.