Cora Harrison

When Mara, Brehon of the Burren, is summoned to the sandy beach of Fanore, on the western fringe of the kingdom of the Burren, she sees a sight that she has never witnessed before during her thirty years as law-enforcer and investigating magistrate: a dead man lying in a boat with no oars. Immediately her scholars jump to the conclusion that the man has been found guilty of kin-murder. The Brehon sentence for this worst of all crimes is that the murderer...

"When Inspector Field shows his friend Charles Dickens the body of a young woman dragged from the River Thames, he cannot have foreseen that the famous author would immediately recognize the victim as Isabella Gordon, a housemaid he had tried to help through his charity. Nor that Dickens and his fellow writer Wilkie Collins would be determine to find out who killed her. Who was Isabella blackmailing, and why? Led on by fragments of a journal discovered...

February, 1512. Mara, Brehon of the Burren, judge and lawgiver, has been invited to the city state of Galway, which is ruled by English laws and a royal charter originally granted by Richard III. Mara wonders whether she can use her legal knowledge to save the life of a man from the Burren who's been caught stealing a meat pie, but events soon take an even more dramatic turn when the mayor's son is charged with a heinous crime.

It was a macabre ending for an unjust judge: his throat slit by a sharp knife; his body stuffed into a lobster pot and left beneath a powerful jet of water shooting up through the cliffs from the turbulent Atlantic. When Mara, Brehon of the nearby kingdom of the Burren, comes to investigate, she knows that her first suspects have to be the five young men who had received such savage sentences for minor crimes.

April 1511: Mara is celebrating the christening of her son when she notices that three of her law students have disappeared from the party. The next morning one of them is found dead, and the other two, along with an important legal document, are missing