THE IRISH ASSASSINS

A historical true-crime tale revisits three notorious Victorian-era murders that shocked Britain and dealt a body blow to the cause of Home Rule for Ireland.

In painstaking and sometimes-harrowing detail, journalist Kavanagh examines the fatal 1882 stabbings of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Britain’s Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, in Phoenix Park in Dublin. Five men—all with ties to the American-funded terrorist group known as the Invincibles—were tried and hanged for the crimes. A sixth, who had turned queen’s evidence, was instead put on a ship to South Africa, giving rise to an Agatha Christie–esque twist involving disguises, fake identities, and a shipboard murder that caused Queen Victoria to write in her journal: “Well-deserved, but shocking!” The attacks were a fateful setback for a secret “truce” being pursued by Prime Minister William Gladstone and Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell, whose mistress and her husband acted as go-betweens. The author sets the stage for the tumult by casting the Donegal town of Gweedore as a microcosm of an Ireland in which, decades after the Great Famine, horrific poverty still prompted desperate responses to the barbarous evictions and other abuses of “ ‘landlordism,’ an entirely pejorative word implying abuse of authority, from rack-renting to mercilessly arbitrary evictions.” To depict broader crises, Kavanagh uses “the shifting episodic structure of today’s television dramas,” or quick cuts from country to country and character to character, which makes it hard to follow the sprawling plot and cast. Yet Kavanagh’s keen sense of Ireland’s pain—and the damage England inflicted on itself with its handling of it—ultimately justifies her conclusion, which approvingly quotes Roy Jenkins’ Gladstone: “What vast benefit would have followed from an Irish settlement in the 1880s, thirty years before the Easter Rising.”

A cinematic, multilayered revenge tragedy centered on Ireland’s fraught quest for independence.