Death by Irish Whiskey

Book 5: Dublin Driver Mysteries

by Catie Murphy

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Animal Cozy Mysteries

Synopsis

Featuring the humor and charm of Ireland, a compelling whodunit, and two Jack Russell Terrier puppies, the latest book in the acclaimed Dublin Driver cozy mystery series is perfect for fans of Carlene O’Connor!

The competition for best whiskey in Ireland will be a publicity bonanza for the winner, and that means there are celebrities involved—like boxer Angus McConal and Megan’s friend Niamh, an up-and-coming actress who’s teamed up with Megan’s uncle, the retired Sligo harbormaster. But rivalries and revelries turn out to be a bad blend when McConal dies at a whiskey tasting. Megan promised her girlfriend she’d quit her amateur sleuthing, but with Niamh and her uncle as suspects, she’s over a barrel . . .
 
With her relationship on the rocks, Megan gets in even deeper when a second entrant in the competition is killed—and her investigation starts zeroing in on a suspect. Now she just needs proof . . .
 
Praise for the Dublin Driver Mysteries
 
“There is so much to like about the cozy perfection that is Catie Murphy’s Death on the Green, from the lush Irish travelogue to the precise balance between comic relief and crime.” —Bookpage STARRED REVIEW

Release date: January 23, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

Angus McConal died in the punch bowl, which Megan couldn’t help think was a fitting end for a boxer.

She made the mistake of saying so out loud, and her girlfriend’s gaze, blazing with fury, nearly ended Megan, too. She hissed, “I didn’t mean to!” by which she meant she didn’t mean to be present for another presumable murder, rather than she didn’t mean to say something horrifically inappropriate in the moment.

Jelena hissed, “You never mean to!” back, and stalked away in a show of gorgeous, long-legged rage. She didn’t go very far, because Detective Garda Paul Bourke was ordering convention center security to block off the exits as he crouched beside Angus McConal’s body.

As if the boxer’s dramatic collapse, his gasping for air, and the horrid final sound he had made wasn’t enough to be certain he was dead, Bourke checked his pulse, waiting a long, weary moment before dropping his chin to his chest and exhaling deeply. Then he rose and asked for something to cover the body with. A pale-faced member of staff got a tablecloth from under the bar.

They spread it over McConal’s unmoving form, and as it settled with a soft billow, Detective Bourke took a heartbeat to meet Megan’s eyes with a warning look.

Megan muffled a completely irrational desire to defend herself. She hadn’t done anything! She nodded anyway. Bourke couldn’t have said “Stay out of it, Megan,” any more clearly if he’d spoken aloud.

“He’s never dead,” her uncle said at Megan’s elbow, genuine shock staining his usually jovial voice. “Sure and he can’t be dead, Megan.”

“I’m sorry, Uncle Rabbie. Come on, we should probably move away from the body, at least. The guards will be here any minute.” Megan cast a grim look of her own toward Paul and corrected herself: “More guards.”

Paul—tall, slim, sandy-red of hair—wasn’t on duty. No one was on duty tonight, except maybe Niamh O’Sullivan. Her megawatt movie star charm was at the Dublin Whiskey Festival’s opening party as part of the promotion for Harbourmaster Whiskey, a new brand she and Megan’s uncle Rabbie had gone in on together. Rabbie was the harbormaster in question, newly retired after decades of being the man behind everything in and out of Sligo’s harbor on the western side of the country.

Rabbie had always struck Megan as the quintessential Irishman, sharply blue of eye and equally sharp of wit, with a well-tended mane of white hair and a fierceness to his smile. He was fit, even in his seventies, and full of vigor, exactly the kind of older image that Ireland wanted to project to the world. His years in the shipping industry seemed to have offered him the chance to meet every single person in Ireland. He was certainly on a first-name basis with an awful lot of them. Technically speaking, he was Megan’s second cousin once removed, but “uncle” covered the generation gap more comfortably, and Megan always thought of him that way.

He was also pale with disbelief as she walked him away from Angus McConal’s body. “I knew him when he was a lad,” the older man said in real dismay. “His granda would bring him around and talk him up when he did well in the fights. What happened, Megan?”

“I don’t know.” Megan bit her tongue on saying she would find out. She had been involved in four murder cases now—more if she allowed herself to think about the fact that more than one person had died in at least two of those cases—and she was absolutely not supposed to be in the proximity of any more murders. No civilian was, of course, but in descending order, Jelena, Detective Bourke, and the entire Irish police force were going to line up to kill her if she got entangled in another one. “I’m sure Paul will figure it out quickly.”

“He was a competitor!” Rabbie said desperately. “His whiskey was up against ours! Are they going to think Niamh and I killed him?”

Megan’s eyebrows rose and she turned to look at her uncle. “I don’t know, Uncle Rabbie. Should they? Do you have some kind of beef I don’t know about?”

For a moment his expression wobbled, reminding Megan that although she’d been in Ireland for most of five years now, she still tended toward some very American expressions. It wasn’t that the Irish didn’t know what the phrase “some kind of beef” meant. It just wasn’t common parlance in this part of the world. Then Rabbie said, “I wouldn’t, no,” almost sullenly, like a child caught on the cusp of misbehaving.

“Rabbie?” Megan heard the warning in her question, and her uncle’s jaw set.

“There’s no story with myself and himself, and I’ll thank you not to poke and prod at me like I was one of your mysteries,” the older man snapped. “I’m only after getting a shock with this happening.”

Megan drew a breath, then exhaled it again, knowing a losing fight when she saw one. If it turned out to be important, she—or the guards—would ferret it out of Rabbie later.

Chaos had erupted around them while she spoke with Rabbie, and it was probably a measure of Megan’s exposure to unexpected dead bodies that she hadn’t really noticed. Now, though, with Rabbie clamming up, she had a moment to take in the panicked situation surrounding her.

The Dublin Whiskey Festival had grown large enough over the past several years to hold its opening evening at the convention center, a Celtic Tiger venue overlooking the River Liffey and the harp-shaped Samuel Beckett Bridge. The organizers regarded opening night as a gala event, rolling out a red carpet and everything. Well, a gold one, technically, in keeping with the whiskey theme. It snaked outside, in front of the CCD’s tall, angled glass windows, and across the broad convention center ground floor, just in case the weather turned desperate. Its path led people to the escalators, sending them upstairs to a genuinely spectacular crystal-and-mirror-lined bar. Everyone, even Megan, who was mostly there because she had a limo license and had driven all her friends over that evening, was dressed to the nines.

The crush of people in tuxedoes and evening gowns trying to reach the escalators looked peculiarly familiar, as did the huddled groups of people who had already given up on escaping and were either crying or staring with ghoulish fascination at Angus McConal’s body lying next to the upended punch bowl. The sound was astonishing, a combination of hysterical sobs, angry shouts, and the buzz of urgent gossip. Megan frowned briefly at the gathering, trying to think of what was familiar about it, then choked on a laugh.

It looked like a movie. This many well-dressed people panicking and running for the doors was straight out of a film scene. Megan, unable to help herself, moved to the glass-walled railings and looked down at the ground floor, searching for the actual, real-life movie star among them.

Niamh had worn red so she would stand out against the gold carpet, and it had worked perfectly. Everyone else in the building might have been in black-and-white, compared to her vibrant brilliance. She had been called to stay on the gold carpet for photographers, and was still there, now fending off reporters who smelled blood in the water.

From above, she appeared poised, grieving, confused, comfortable, compliant, and confident all at once, even as people shouted questions at her and stuck their microphones or cameras in her face. Megan couldn’t imagine how she coped with it on a normal day, never mind now, thrust into the middle of an unexpected crisis.

Paul Bourke’s voice rose. Megan turned away from watching Niamh to listen to the police detective as he asked people to put their phones away and to please not post on social media right now. He might as well have asked the tide not to rise, but Megan admired the fact that he even made the effort.

A few people did put their phones away, their expressions either sheepish or mortified, depending on their level of guilt. Most didn’t, and one young woman pushed her way to the front of the crowd circling Angus’s body, and began talking into her phone. She looked about eleven years old from Megan’s early-forties vantage point, but an actual tween would have adults supervising her, and Paul wasn’t that lucky in this situation.

Podcaster Hannah Flanagan came from a genuinely well-respected whiskey family in Ireland, her family’s distillery going back nearly two hundred years. She was twenty-two, not eleven, but she was baby-faced by nature and had wispy blond hair and large blue eyes that played into her looking younger than she really was. Megan was surprised she’d gone into podcasting instead of acting, because she absolutely did not have a face meant for radio.

She did have a voice meant for it, though: low and smoky with a bit of a purr to it, like two centuries of family whiskey had distilled itself into her vocal cords. She knew everything about whiskey. Not just her family’s, but about all of it, everywhere, as far as Megan could tell. That was what she talked about on her podcast, and either her voice or her topic were so fascinating that she’d racked up a host of awards and global sponsorships. She’d been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, to be sure, but she’d turned it into a whole cutlery set.

Megan winced and smirked simultaneously at her own terrible metaphor, then made her way toward Hannah, hoping to interrupt her recording. Then a trickle of warning chilled her spine and she stopped before she got to the young woman. Podcasters recorded everything, and the last thing Megan wanted was to end up as a “murder driver” segment on an internationally renowned broadcast.

More to the point, the last thing Jelena wanted was for Megan to end up on a globally-popular podcast. Other people were crowding up to Hannah anyway, trying to get a word in edgewise in hopes that they would end up famous. Megan turned away, looking through the crowd for her girlfriend.

Jelena was a point of stillness in the agitation. She’d found a chair and sat with her face in her hands and her curly hair falling from its updo to cascade around her fingers. Megan’s heart twisted so hard she felt dizzy. This was not what she’d promised as their night out. It was supposed to be rubbing elbows with the beautiful, the wealthy, and the famous, not finding themselves stuck in the convention center in the world’s biggest locked-room mystery.

She sighed, then braced herself to go offer her girlfriend support or accept the brunt of a scolding she didn’t necessarily deserve, but wouldn’t blame Jelena for. People did have a horrible tendency to drop dead around Megan, and that just wasn’t normal.

“Meghaaaan?” A shrill voice, albeit used at less volume than usual, cut through the noise and a petite woman rushed through the crowd to embrace Megan unexpectedly. “Meghaaaan, I did not know you would be here! How could you not drive me tonight when you are wearing my suit! I cannot forgive you! Oh, but I must, you are too beautiful to be angry at. Meghaaan, what is going on? I am here for a party and to promote my whiskey, yes? And now someone is dead? You must fix this, Meghaaan! You must fix it now!”

Megan said, “I—” faintly, then paused to recalibrate before she even tried to say anything else. After a few seconds, she managed, “Hello, Ms. de la Fuente,” which she thought was safe enough, and which bought her a little more time to organize her thoughts.

Carmen de la Fuente was probably the richest person Megan had ever personally met. As far as Megan could tell, she lived her entire life going from one exclusive party to another, hosting several of them along the way, and surrounding herself with staggeringly beautiful women whom she spent outrageous amounts of money on dressing in fanciful, gorgeous ways. Megan had driven her once early in her career at Leprechaun Limos, and had apparently charmed the little Spanish woman. Carmen—who rarely, to the best of Megan’s recollection, said Megan with fewer than three “a” sounds—had announced that Megan would drive her everywhere from then on, and paid accordingly for the privilege of having her favorite driver whenever she was in Dublin.

And Megan was, in fact, wearing her suit. Carmen had had the gold suit made for Megan to wear when she drove Carmen, and while her boss normally wouldn’t let anybody drive while out of uniform, even Orla made exceptions for Carmen de la Fuente. It was by far the fanciest thing Megan owned, and she actually felt a stab of guilt at wearing it while not driving Carmen. “I didn’t know you were in town.”

Carmen sniffed. “I called dreadful Ms. Keegan and she told me you weren’t answering your phone. I was forced to take a helicopter from the Weston Airport to the convention center.”

Megan had to bite the inside of her cheek very hard to keep from laughing out loud. It was true Orla had rung her, but she’d already been driving Rabbie, Jelena, Niamh, and Paul to the whiskey gala, and hadn’t picked up. “I didn’t even know there was a helicopter landing site at the convention center.”

Carmen fluttered a hand, implying that such middling details were unimportant for someone as rich as she was. Megan lifted her gaze again—she wasn’t tall, but she could look over Carmen’s head easily—and glanced around for the usual bevy of beauties following Carmen. “You don’t seem to have an entourage tonight.”

The tiny, wealthy woman’s entire expression melted into what, despite her theatrical persona, seemed to be genuine grief. “Isabella left me. I am not a serious enough person for her. What is the point in frivolous beauty if you have no one to share it with?”

Megan had no idea who Isabella was, and spent a moment wondering if she would know if she kept up with the tabloid gossip columns. It didn’t really matter, though. “I’m sorry to hear that. And—I’m sorry, did you say you were here to promote your whiskey?” There were several new whiskeys competing for the best new whiskey award, but she was sure she would have noticed if Carmen de la Fuente’s name was attached to one of them.

“Shh.” Carmen pursed her lips and put her finger to them, managing a smile at the same time. “The Midnight Sunrise is mine, no? For ten years we have sat it in casks to see what would come of it, and now it is ready. But I am only the money, not the face.” Another flicker of distress went through her brown eyes, although she kept the smile in place. “Again, I am not serious enough. Whiskey is serious business, and ours is, mmm, dark? A dilettante is not the right face to sell it.”

“Midnight Sunrise,” Megan echoed in surprise. There was a Northern Irish actor attached to that, an older man with a great voice and a steely gaze. She could see how he would sell whiskey in a way Carmen couldn’t, although unlike Carmen, he wasn’t here for the opening gala. “I didn’t know that was you.”

“Shh,” Carmen said again, lightly, before her face fell and she looked toward Angus McConal’s body. Megan glanced toward him, too, and wasn’t surprised to discover he’d been covered, and that convention center security surrounded the body so no one could take any more pictures. “What happened, Meghan?” For once she mostly dropped the drawn-out vowels, which made Megan smile a little sadly.

“I don’t know. I’m not going to find out, either. That’s the gardaí’s job.”

“He wasn’t a nice man,” Carmen said, still in that light voice. “But he did not deserve to die in a whiskey punch bowl.”

“You knew him?” Megan asked before she could stop herself, then actually physically bit her tongue to keep from asking more questions.

Carmen only needed the one, though. “Oh yes. Only a little, but yes. A friend with very bad taste in men dated him for a little while, and brought him to some of my parties. I told her she could not bring him again after he hit a man and the head of my security threw him off the yacht.”

Megan said, “Good grief. Was everyone okay?”

“The man who got hit was very angry, but unharmed. My security man, tonight when Angus died, he smiled.”

Megan’s stomach sank. “He’s here?”

Carmen’s eyes widened. “Of course. I am very rich, Meghan. I go almost nowhere without a security team.”

“Right. No, of course you don’t. Come with me, please, Carmen. I need you to talk to someone.” Megan offered her elbow, because Carmen would like that, and it would help if she was happy when Megan told Paul Bourke she’d found his first potential suspect in Angus McConal’s death.

Detective Paul Bourke had been made for skinny suits, and a slim-cut tuxedo looked even sharper on him than his usual pinstripes did. Megan had seen him in the tux before—at one of Carmen’s parties, in fact—but she was still impressed with how well he looked in it. Which was the point of formal wear, she supposed: it should always stun, even if the person in it had tight shoulders and a tense jaw as she approached. There were a lot of people who wanted to escape the convention center, and the only thing standing between them and their departure was Detective Bourke’s authority as a police officer. He was at the head of the escalators, politely and firmly refusing to let an older white man with an impatient air go past.

He still managed a brief, if thin, smile for Carmen. “Ms. de la Fuente.”

“Detective Bourke.” Carmen’s own smile nearly rivaled Niamh’s for a moment. “It’s very nice to see you again.”

Megan kept her eyebrows from rising with effort. She hadn’t expected Carmen to remember Paul, although she’d approved of him at the yacht party they’d met at.

“You, too.” Bourke’s gaze flickered to Megan, then back to Carmen. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I assume Megan brought you over here for a reason.”

“Her head of security has a history with McConal, and is here tonight,” Megan said almost apologetically.

Bourke’s blue eyes went eagle-sharp as Carmen let out a dramatic gasp. “Meghaaan! No! You cannot think—!”

“I don’t think anything,” Megan said as strenuously as she dared. “That’s why I’m bringing you to Detective Bourke. He’s the one who’s supposed to be thinking in this situation.”

“Megan . . .” Paul managed not to groan, but it was a near thing. “Go get somebody from the center’s security team, please. I should talk to Ms. de la Fuente’s bodyguard, but I can’t leave you here to block the escalator. You have no authority.”

“No, but I have a mean right hook,” Megan said brightly. Paul’s expression went completely flat and she mumbled, “Right, going to find security.” She scurried off to the people surrounding McConal’s body, leaving Carmen with Paul. A moment later one of the convention center security team, a guy about twice as wide across the shoulders as Paul, went to take Paul’s place at the head of the escalators. The older man decided he had better things to do than argue with a security guy who could be mistaken for a wall, and sulked off to his well-dressed date. Megan, feeling like she’d put quite enough in motion, turned to go find Jelena.

Jelena was already there, her full lips pressed tight as she looked down at Megan, whose heart lurched again. Despite having slid her hands into them, Jelena’s tight-wound black curls were still mostly piled on top of her head, dripping around her cheeks and nape more than before, maybe, but still flawless. Earrings the same color as her angry aquamarine eyes dangled from her lobes, and she was tall and entirely too gorgeous in a flowing jade dress borrowed from Niamh. “Why were you talking to Paul?”

“So that he could do the investigating on something that Carmen mentioned,” Megan said firmly. “Because I’m staying out of it, Yella.”

A trace of softness crept into Jelena’s anger, and after a moment she sighed, then pulled Megan into her arms. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be suspicious. I just don’t like this, Megan.”

“I kn. . .