A Fatal Inheritance: A Burren Mystery

The discovery of the body of Clodagh O’Lochlainn on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic, where she’s tied to the stone statue of a god with a noose around her neck, propels Harrison’s solid 13th whodunit set in 16th-century Ireland (after 2015’s Condemned to Death). Just 10 days earlier, Mara, an investigating magistrate and law teacher, presided over a legal case in which Clodagh successfully contested the claims of four of her cousins to her late father’s farm. The cousins asserted that her father promised the farm to them before he went senile, in appreciation of the care they had given him. But the will that the cousins saw locked in a chest of Fergus, another magistrate, had disappeared, and Fergus, whose faculties were in decline, had no memory of making or storing the document, leaving Mara no choice in her verdict. Given this perceived injustice, Clodagh’s cousins are the natural suspects. Harrison again makes the Irish system of justice accessible and intriguing in the service of a clever plot. Agent: Peter Buckman, Ampersand Agency (U.K.). (Mar.)