Perhaps inspired by the real-life disappearance of Northern Ireland mother Jean McConville, Dempsey invites us inside two crimes. The first is a murderous attack on five roommates, and then there’s the cold case resurrected by the message scrawled on their wall: Who Took Eden Mulligan? Eden’s children, now adults, have been adamant in the decades since her disappearance that she wouldn’t leave them, but the woman was an enigmatic outsider in “a pit of savagery and subterfuge.” A Protestant living in a Catholic area of Belfast, she looked a mite too good for neighbors to care about her fate. Detective Danny Stowe has lots to lose in his inquiries—he’s on thin ice after smashing a perpetrator’s head against a wall and needs this win. For that, and more personal reasons, he persuades his best friend from college, a forensic psychologist who’s enduring her own issues, to join the investigation. The old and new cases, and the broken families involved, bring forth the weariness of living in sectarian strife, a mundanity that’s broken by moments of horror. Dempsey excels in portraying the anger that emerges when the dreamy veil of struggle lifts to reveal political violence as “a cover for psychopaths.” Read this for both a satisfying puzzle and an inside look at a culture turned sour.
