White Bones by Graham Masterton

Summary

Eleven bodies all together, not a round dozen or even a baker’s dozen although, as Detective Katie Maguire would discover later, that would have made the full set. Actually, not bodies. Eleven sets of bones. Scattered remains. Exactly what ‘Irish Travellers’ would do to their dead enemies – taking their feet away so they couldn’t march through the pearly gates. But as soon as revenge becomes a possible motive there are all manner of suspects, and the simple farm of John Meagher, near Cork in Southern Ireland, becomes the focus for intense speculation. Newspaper reporters have their own agenda, as do Kate Maguire’s superiors, and an author with IRA sympathies is happy to speculate about anything that would make headlines in the press and put the Brits in a bad light.

None of which can stop the fate of a young Californian girl who had come to Ireland to find herself and her roots. Rural Ireland is no place to hitch a lift while this killer is around. People who stop to give a lift might sometimes be thinking more of satisfying themselves and their needs than giving a helping hand. The help this man needs from Fiona Kelly is way beyond any experience that she had encountered and, had she lived, she would have remembered every horrific moment. Only precision with the cuts, agonising pain and delicate lace from petticoats will do.

However, Professor Gerard O’Brien can make history yield its secrets and past rituals so that her fate was not in vain. Not so the intervention of Eamonn Collins when ‘push came to shove’, even though he came with a long heritage of serious wrongdoing. Paul Maguire, Katie’s husband, was in any case hardly going to be in a position to thank him for what he did. She, though, had a bargain to keep and blind eyes were turned everywhere. Anything to stop the madness and keep the peace.