The Claddagh Ring

Galway. A wet October morning. A family dead in a quiet Salthill house, and one child still alive, folded into a kitchen press where the killers never thought to look.

When paramedic Liam Hennessy walks into that kitchen, he finds a note, and on it a Claddagh ring laid heart-inward, the old Galway token of love and loyalty turned into a mark of ownership over the dead. On the surviving girl's neck is a faded brand he last saw years before, on trafficked women pulled from a broken-down trawler in his Naval Service days.

What looks like a triple murder in the west of Ireland opens into a twenty-seven-year trail that runs from a looted Soviet armoury to a shipping container in California, and into the heart of a Romanian crime dynasty that treats people as cargo. As a Galway detective and an Interpol investigator work the case from both ends, every road closes against a wall, and the one thread that might lead somewhere is a cheap gilt ring that should never have been left behind.

A braided, two-timeline crime novel about the machinery of trafficking and what decency is worth when justice cannot be had.

For readers of Adrian McKinty, Jo Nesbø and Dervla McTiernan.