In the first installment of bestselling author Carlene O’Connor’s new Home to Ireland Mystery series, New York Tara Meehan’s first trip to Galway, Ireland may be her last.
Jump right into the beauty and splendor—and murder—of Tara’s Irish adventure! With a gorgeous setting, suspicious characters, and a deadly mystery—Murder in Galway will have you packing your bags… bags…
Tara never imagined her introduction to Ireland like this—carrying her mam’s ashes to honor her final request: “Tell Johnny I’m sorry…Take me home.” She’s never met her mam’s estranged brother, Johnny Meehan, who owns an architectural salvage business in Galway. Although Tara is immediately charmed by the medieval city, the locals seem wary of strangers and a gypsy warns her that death is all around.
When Tara arrives at her uncle’s stone cottage, the prophesy seems true. A dead man lies sprawled over the threshold in a pool of blood. The victim turns out to be Johnny’s wealthiest client, and her missing uncle is the garda’s number-one suspect. In trying to find Johnny and solve the crime, Tara uncovers her mam and uncle’s troubled past. But with a desperate killer about, she had better mind herself, or they’ll be tossing her ashes in Galway Bay…
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Murder in Galway by Carlene O’Connor is the first in a new series focussing on Tara Meehan, an early 30s interior designer from NYC that is returning to her recently passed mother’s home in Galway, Ireland to meet her uncle whom she has never seen before. After her arrival, she is ensnared into a complicated murder/mystery all the while trying to find her place and a second chance on happiness after a complicated past.
I loved Tara. She is strong, smart, stubborn, independent, passionate, and caring. My heart went out to her concerning her past. I enjoyed her journey to Galway and all of the wonderful characters that inhabited the quirky town.
The author’s descriptions concerning the town, history, and landscape were divine and allowed me to create and excellent image of the town. I also liked the plot. It was intricate, complex, with plenty of twists to keep me guessing until the end. Impressive!
I also liked Danny and I cannot wait to see future books to find out how the business (and the relationship) evolves.
There is plenty of material that is presented within this book to easily allow multiple followups and installments.
An excellent new series!!!!!
5/5 stars
Always enjoy Irish stories. This had some great characters and a good story.
Outstanding audio! Tara has come to Galway to spread her mother’s ashes and deliver a message to an Uncle she didn’t even know that she had. However, upon arriving she stumbles into a mess of lies and secrets that is leading the local police to think that her Uncle is a murderer. Not knowing who she can trust, she sets out to unravel the mysteries that surround her family and in the process will either lose her life or find it! An excellent plot with a fabulous strong female sleuth who navigates life in a foreign country as well as untangling a web of lies in an intelligent albeit imperfect way. I really can’t wait for the next book to be available as I can’t wait to see what path Tara takes in the next book.
I have read many of Carlene O’Connor’s Irish Village series, and am a big fan. So when I saw this new series I was anxious to try it. I enjoyed this book but it has not grabbed me the way the Irish Village series did. But it’s just the first book so I will keep reading and see how the characters develop. I guess what I didn’t like was the way Tara was portrayed as this pushy American. But she had never been to Ireland before and she is from New York so I should cut her some slack. I think she will tone it down once she becomes an Irish resident if that is what she ends up doing.
I am an avid reader of this author’s Irish Village Mystery series and was very excited to see she has started this new series – also based in Ireland. I believe the author splits her year between living in Ireland and living in the United States.
Tara Meehan has come to Galway, Ireland to spread her mother’s ashes and to carry a message from her mother to Johnny Meehan, her mother’s estranged brother. Tara doesn’t even know if her uncle Johnny is alive. She’s never met him, never corresponded with him – no contact, ever. She has no idea what caused the rift between her mother and her uncle, so she has no idea what kind of reception she’ll get from him. Almost as soon as she arrived, the box containing her mother’s ashes was ripped from her hand by a street juggler and ended up opened and covering a stranger who had tried to retrieve it for her – then, directly on the heels of that, she discovered a dead body in the doorway of her uncle’s cottage. What a way to begin her stay in Galway!
Believing the body belonged to her uncle Johnny, she called the Garda (Irish police) and told them she’d found the body of Johnny Meehan. She also told others that she’d found Johnny’s body and nobody seemed surprised. Evidently, her uncle wasn’t an esteemed member of the community. When the body is officially identified, it isn’t Johnny Meehan but his best customer, Emmett Walsh, and her uncle Johnny is the suspect in the murder. With Uncle Johnny missing and the police not looking for other suspects, Tara believes it is her family duty to show that her uncle isn’t guilty – or – if he is, to help find him and turn him in.
The mystery is a good one with lots of potential suspects and victims. I was pretty sure who the culprit was almost as soon as they graced the page, but I certainly had no clue why that would be the case. There are many red herrings, many possible scenarios for the murder to have happened, and some really strange happenings going on in Johnny’s life. Tara finds yet another body, and this one had her uncle’s business card lying right there in the blood. Goodness wasn’t that convenient. The Garda doubles down on Johnny as the prime suspect and tells Tara to leave Ireland immediately – for her own safety of course. Can Tara and her uncle’s employee, Danny O’Donnell, solve the mystery before Detective Sergeant Gable finds and arrests her uncle? Danny is not a willing participant in the investigation, but he does what he can to help Tara.
This book just didn’t reach right out and pull me into the story. I didn’t care for any of the characters other than perhaps Danny. I also didn’t care for the anti-American sentiments which seemed to be espoused by the residents of Galway. I’m sure there are probably those with the anti-American sentiments in the real Galway, but I’d wager it isn’t as prevalent as the author intimated it was. With so many suspects, red-herrings, and things going on I would have thought the book would be fast-paced and suspenseful, but I actually found parts of it a bit dull.
While I wasn’t in love with this first offering, I’ll definitely try the next book in the series to see where things go. The first book in a series often isn’t the best the series has to offer because it has to fill so many functions – such as introducing us to the characters, setting up the series’s premise, etc., and providing a compelling story. If the second book is like this one, I’ll probably not follow the series, but I’m sure I’ll become a series fan if it picks up the pace.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an Advanced Reader Copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
This was an excellent beginning to a new series as we meet Tara, travelling from America with her mother’s ashes. From the moment she arrives things don’t go as planned and she ends up in the middle of mysteries that she needs to solve. Great characters and enough suspense to keep you engaged till the very end.