This was an intering read. I loved the way the author described the people and places in and around Dublin. However I felt as though he left out peices and they left you wondering what happened. ( )

A priest gets murdered and his body mutilated in an Irish estate home and long-suffering Detective Inspector Strafford (who always has to correct people from “Stafford”) is on the case. Everyone’s a suspect, everyone is holding back secrets, and catholic church is pressuring Strafford to hush it all up. To add insult to deadly injury, it won’t stop snowing, making any sort of mobility a difficulty.

Christie but make it Irish, a smidge more modern, and quite a bit more than a smidge gritty and violent. I loved it up until I didn’t, but my aversion is certainly my own and not the fault of the book, which is wonderfully written. What I didn’t love was the part of the story in which the priest was a pedophile, which in itself wouldn’t have turned me away, but there’s a chapter written from his POV about his ‘sins,’ and that tips it over into the Ewewewickickick category for me. ( )

I'm a priest, for Christ's sake - how can this be happening to me? He had noticed the empty socket where the light bulb was missing but had thought nothing of it. However, when he was halfway along the corridor, where the darkness was deepest, something seized him by the left shoulder, some sort of animal, it seemed, or a large heavy bird, that drove a single talon deep into the right side of his neck just above the rim of his coll. All he felt was the quick, stabbing blow, then his arm went numb all the way down to his fingertips.

Note to self: read the content warnings, or at least the description. Well done and depressingly realistic, but hoo boy did I not need that POV section near the end. ( )

* I would like to thank Netgalley and the publishers for the opportunity to review this book. *

In the lead-up to Christmas, DI St. John Strafford is sent to a remote country house to investigate the gruesome murder of a local priest. Strafford has been picked for the job because he is the scion of a wealthy family, almost unique in the Garda.

Strafford arrives at Ballyglass House to find that the whole area is beset by heavy snow-falls and a deep winter pall. Colonel Osborne, owner of Ballyglass, is less than co-operative and seems keen to clear it all up quickly, with no reflection on the family. The local Cardinal also takes an interest, and puts serious pressure on Strafford to gloss over the sordid details, and wind the investigation up.

There are several references in the narrative where Strafford considers that it is all too much like being surrounded by a bunch of Irish countryside stereotypes. That is indeed true, and the downfall of this book. It comes across all too much like a gorier Midsomer Murders, and was therefore not my kind of crime novel. ( )