In Dublin's Fair City

January 22, 2007
Set in 1903, Bowen's sixth brisk Molly Murphy historical (after 2006's Oh Danny Boy
) takes the Irish immigrant to New York City back to the Emerald Isle for an assignment to find a theater impresario's long-lost sister, left behind when his family fled the potato famine 50 years earlier. Even though Molly had left Ireland under a cloud of suspicion herself, she bids a temporary farewell to her beau, New York police captain Daniel Sullivan. The voyage begins auspiciously when a famous actress offers Molly her first class stateroom, but Molly's discovery of a corpse in her sumptuous bed is only the beginning of a complicated, dangerous journey. In Dublin, she becomes embroiled in the Irish struggle for freedom and finds herself a target for murder. With a riveting plot capped off by a dramatic conclusion, Bowen captures the passion and struggles of the Irish people at the turn of the 20th century.

February 15, 2007
Molly Murphy, Bowen's plucky early-twentieth-century private investigator, sails back home to Ireland to find a woman who is in line for a large inheritance. But the investigatory work starts earlier than she expects when, onboard ship, a young woman is murdered and another woman, an actress, disappears. The plot thickens upon docking in Ireland, when Molly discovers her own brother trying to collect the missing actress' luggage, which contains a substantial supply of firearms. Further thickening ensues as Molly learns that someone else is trying to find the missing woman and will do whatever it takes to make sure Molly is out of the picture. A plot that feels more convoluted than it needs to be detracts slightly from the series' main strength: hanging out with the irrepressibly charming Molly. But this remains one of the most accessible and comfortably entertaining of all historical mystery series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)