County Kerry on the southwestern coast of Ireland. Ireland’s most westerly county – only the Atlantic, and then the new world beyond. A place where you reach the end of the road, about as far as you can go before getting wet feet or heading off to embark on a new life across the Atlantic or, as this is CrimeReads, getting caught where there’s nowhere else to run!
Carlene O’Connor’s family crossed the Atlantic. Her great-grandmother emigrated from Ireland to America, but it appears she’s been going back for a while now writing. She’s the author of the bestselling Irish Village Mysteries, the Home To Ireland series, and, just for this column, the County Kerry Mysteries series. O’Connor’s Kerry is striking and rugged and home to Detective Inspector Cormac O’Brien working out of the Killarney murder squad. In No Strangers Here (2022) the body of Jimmy O’Reilly, sixty-nine years old and dressed in a suit and his dancing shoes, is propped on a boulder of a Kerry beach. Jimmy was a wealthy racehorse owner, known far and wide as The Dancing Man in his hometown, Dingle in County Kerry. Dingle’s usually the preserve of tourists and charm but DI O’Brien finds an altogether different place.
In Some of Us Are Looking (2023) O’Brien is back investigating a row that spirals in to murder on the Dingle peninsula and a new relationship with vet Dimpna Wilde. Then pregnant women are being threatened in You Have Gone Too Far (2024) and then finally in the series (so far) Come Through Your Door (2025) three dead bodies disturbing Dingle’s usually calm and placid life.
Dee Davis’s After Twilight (2023) is more rugged Kerry coastline, perhaps a perfect place to disappear? When Kacy Macgrath’s life crumbled two years ago, she changed her name and escaped to her grandmother’s cottage in Ireland. Here she lives anonymously, with no reminders of the past – except the terrifying images that continue to haunt her dreams. Images of the stormy night her husband, Alex, walked out on her -– and fell into the raging waters near their Long Island home. After his death, Kacy uncovered secrets about Alex she was better off not knowing, so she ran away. Now, across the sea and in County Kerry, someone is watching her. Book one of the Random Heroes Collection by Davis.
Oileán na Caillte translates as “The Lost Island”, the fictional location for Irish crime writer Jo Spain’s novel, The Darkest Place (2018). It’s book four in Dublin-based Spain’s Detective Inspector Tom Reynolds and his team series that moves all over Ireland from Dublin out into the countryside and coast. Now it’s Christmas Day, and Reynolds is called to a mass grave on Oileán na Caillte, which used to house a psychiatric institution, St. Christina’s. But then it transpires another body has been discovered amongst the dead – one of the doctors who went missing from the hospital in mysterious circumstances forty years ago. He appears to have been brutally murdered. Kerry never really got more rugged or remote than Oileán na Caillte.
We need at least one mystery in the town of Killarney on the shores of Lough Leane in Kerry. It’s a stop on the Ring of Kerry scenic drive, and the start and finishing point of the 200-km Kerry Way walking trail and…. Where child protection worker Dana Gibson lives. In Killarney: Small Town, Big Secrets (2024) by Nikki Mottram Dana is looking for missing foster kid Jayden Maloney. But Killarney is a town of family feuds, allegations against a local parish bigwig and an increase in drug trafficking across the border. It’s also raining heavily and the Condamine River looks set to burst its banks and flood Killarney. Mottram is Australian and other books in the Dana Gibson series take her to Queensland.
Also in Killarney is Colin O’Sullivan’s Killarney Blues (2013). The town might be picturesque but Bernard Dunphy, eccentric jarvey (a kind of taxi in Ireland) and guitarist, gets embroiled in a violent crime.
Now don’t be getting away with the idea that all these books are just fictional crimes and that Kerry’s really the Ireland of your dreams – there’s some real crimes too. Anthony Galvin’s Ring of Death: Famous Kerry Murders (2013) retells some of the most notorious murders in Kerry, including a two-day orgy of slaughter perpetrated by state forces during the Civil War, two farmers fatally fighting over a patch of land not big enough to accommodate a picnic blanket, and the tragedy of a baby stabbed to death on a beach, with another infant’s body found during the subsequent investigation. To this day, the identities of the children, their mothers and the murderer remain a mystery, but the case led to the government setting up a tribunal to investigate the Gardaí (Irish police) and how they had handled the inquiry.
And finally, as we often like to present to you, an oddity – Joseph Caldwell’s The Pig Did It (2009). Basically, a pig escapes and destroys the well-tended garden of Kitty McCloud. Cue introductions to the plagiarizing Kitty, her blood-feud rival Kieran, and a sexy swineherd (what other sort is there in Kerry!!) named Lolly. All set against the dramatic backdrop of the Kerry coastline. An hilarious mystery with a cast of Irish characters and a somewhat bemused and lost American – sort of sums up a lot of Kerry in the summer!
