Death of an Irish Druid

Book 6: Dublin Driver Mysteries

by Catie Murphy

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Amateur Sleuth; Animal Cozy Mysteries

Synopsis

Featuring the humor and charm of Ireland, a compelling whodunit, a sleuthing American expat limo driver, 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!

Megan is excited to show her visiting American friends the best of Ireland. A dead body in a holy well, however, was not on her list. The victim is Seamus Nolan, nicknamed “the Irish Druid” for his controversial efforts to rewild his country estate. The local police seem all-too-willing to write off his death as an accident. But Megan’s instincts say not so fast . . .

Megan knows that sleuthing cost her her last girlfriend. Maybe solving another murder will help her make peace with that. And she’s even more determined to figure out whodunnit when she learns that an antiquated, law may pass the estate on to Nolan’s land-grabbing, sell-out uncle instead of his beloved daughter . . .

But then, with Nolan out of the picture, a rival conservationist’s bid for a major grant is uncontested. And as more suspects crop up, so does a toxic surprise on the estate, throwing everyone’s plans, and Nolan’s reputation, into jeopardy. Now Megan will have to unearth a killer with a very dirty secret . . .

Release date: January 21, 2025

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

Rafael Williams, Megan “#MurderDriver” Malone’s best friend, was not, thank goodness, dead.

He was, however, a huge dork. The moment he came through the arrival doors to see her, he called, “Megan in the hooooooouse!” to the dismay of both Megan and the slender Black woman with him, and to the amusement of everybody else within earshot. Which was several hundred people, at eight fifty in the morning at Dublin International Airport.

Megan put her face in her hands, laughed into them, and lifted her gaze to beam at Raf, who reached across the waist-high barrier to hug her like he couldn’t wait an extra four seconds to walk around it. Megan said, “I am so glad to see you, mi amigo. You know it’s no longer two-thousand-and-whatever-it-was when we still said things like that, right?”

His wife, Sarah, said, “No,” wryly. She wasn’t tall—not even Megan’s height—but she was ballerina-slim and had long limbs that made her seem tall. Her hair was pulled back in very, very dark-blue braids that looped at her nape, and she had an elegant, calm air even after an international flight. Rafael let Megan go, and the two of them came around the barrier before Sarah added, “Raf is convinced that if he’s cringe enough, he’ll actually come out the other side and be cool again. I don’t know how to convince him otherwise.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Megan said happily. “Your oldest friends are the people to tell you the hard truths. So, I’m Megan,” she added, and offered a hand, smiling broadly. “Nice to finally meet you, Sarah.”

“Oh, we’re doing it that way, are we?” Sarah shook Megan’s hand very formally, then pulled her into a hug. “It’s about time. I’m so glad to actually put a hug with the face.”

“My two best girls.” Rafael’s perpetual tan was paler than Megan could ever remember seeing it, and he had more gray scattered through his black hair than Megan expected, yet he beamed at the two of them. “I can’t believe it’s taken this long to get you two in the same place.”

“And that we had to end up in Ireland to do it.” Sarah gave a slightly dramatic shiver, beneath her long, chocolate-colored wool coat and the bright, lightweight scarves around its collar. “Is it always this cold?”

“In January? Mostly, yes.” Megan glanced back at the big windows and sky bridge behind them. Enough clouds rolled across the sky to justify the spatters of rain against the windows, but sunlight glimmered around the horizon, and she figured the odds of rainbows as they exited were fairly high. “Come on, though, you live in San Francisco.”

“ ‘The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,’ ” Sarah quoted. “I was born in Abuja and haven’t been warm since I left at age eight.”

“I’ve turned out to be better at chilly weather than I expected,” Megan admitted. “Austin runs at least ten degrees warmer than Ireland at all times, but I don’t really miss it. Are we ready? I’ve got the car in the parking garage.”

“We’re ready.” Rafael hefted two suitcases that moved so easily it was clear they’d packed light on the trip over, presumably in anticipation of packing much more heavily on the way home. Megan offered to take one, and in a true chivalrous fashion, he let her. “Ten degrees, that can’t be right, though. It’s gotta be more like twenty, at least.”

“Celsius,” Sarah said in an almost-smug tone. “I told you, everywhere civilized uses it.”

“And I’ve apparently been in Ireland long enough to default to it,” Megan said with some surprise. “I never would have thought I would. Oh my god, I’m so glad to see you two again.”

“Me again,” Raf said. “Her for the first time.”

“I have seen Sarah many times on vone calls,” Megan protested. “It’s not my fault I missed the wedding.” Which was true: she’d been on active military duty at the time, unable to get leave, and Sarah had been on tour with her ballet company the only time Megan had made it San Francisco before moving to Ireland. She stopped dead in the sky bridge, distracted from her thoughts by a brilliant arc of colors in the sky. “Oh, look, there is a rainbow!”

The other two squealed like they’d never seen one before, and Raf put his suitcase down to fumble for his phone so they could get a selfie. “In the Dublin airport sky bridge,” Megan said aloud, grinning. “With the parking garage in the background. So picturesque. Let me take that for you.”

She took his phone, snapped a couple of pictures, and then got dragged into a selfie after all, a rainbow shining behind their heads and all three of them smiling like overexcited teenagers. “I’m posting this with the murder driver hashtag,” Rafael said gleefully.

“I will end you.” Megan lunged for his phone and knocked them both into the sky bridge wall, causing a reverberation that made half the travelers in the area glare at them with a mix of scorn and concern.

“He warned me you would revert to being nine,” Sarah said with a note of wonder. “I didn’t know he meant it literally. Or that it would happen so fast.”

“I blame an international flight and having no idea what time it is.” Raf wobbled to his feet, made sure Megan was on hers, and stuffed his phone safely in his pocket, where she couldn’t get to it. “And I’m not really going to murder-driver-tag it. How are you doing with that, anyway?”

“With murder driving? Great, it’s been weeks since anybody died on my watch.”

Rafael gave her a gentle look, as if she hadn’t known he wasn’t talking about the actual murder driver thing at all. Or he was, but only in the context of the latest spate of murders having been the final straw for Megan’s now-ex-girlfriend. They’d broken up a couple of months earlier, and she wasn’t as over it as she thought she should be. “You’re not here for me to be all gloom and doom at you for two weeks. I’m fine, really. It’s okay.”

“We are here for you to lean on us,” Sarah said as gently as Raf had looked. “That’s what friends are for.”

“Well, they’re also for dragging all over the countryside and showing off everything I’ve learned living in Ireland, which will be a lot more fun if I’m not mopey. And speaking of which, how are you two feeling after the flight? Do you want to throw yourself into things so you stay awake today and then get sent to bed at a sensible hour, or do you need to collapse for a while?” They were down the escalator by then, walking across into the parking lot for privately hired cars, where Megan was shamelessly taking advantage of her limo-driver status and the car she’d rented from her boss’s business for two weeks.

Sarah tightened her coat around herself again, shivering less theatrically this time. “Coffee and then exploring. If I go to sleep now, I’m never going to get onto Irish time, but I need something warm to drink.”

“She can say that because she didn’t work an eighteen-hour shift right before getting on the plane,” Raf mumbled, but nodded agreement anyway. “No, she’s right, though. Give me a coffee drip, and I’m good to go.”

Megan snorted. “Drip coffee isn’t much of a thing in Ireland.”

“Doctor Williams knows the difference between a coffee drip and drip coffee!” Raf said, mock-offended, and both women laughed. A minute later they were hefting their bags into the back of the limo—actually a Lincoln Town Car, Megan’s favorite of the limo service’s vehicles—and she was promising that if they could stay awake through forty minutes of approaching-Dublin traffic, she would take them out for the best coffee in the city.

“I have a better idea. I could sleep for forty minutes and then have the coffee.” Raf put his head against the window and closed his eyes as soon as he got in the car, apparently meaning to do exactly as he’d said. Sarah examined him a moment, then got in the front with Megan and gave her a wicked smile.

“Perfect. You can tell me all his embarrassing childhood secrets while we drive.”

From the back seat, Raf said, “Hey!” without opening his eyes, and before they’d left the parking lot, he was snoring very, very softly.

Sarah gave him a fond look over her shoulder and murmured, “He really is exhausted. Those long shifts at the hospital are impossible. I don’t know how we’re going to deal with it if I ever do get pregnant. Sometimes I get the impression that being married to an ER doctor is a lot like being a single parent.” She made a face. “Which isn’t what we came here to talk about, either.”

“What was that you were saying about friends being there to lean on?” Megan asked as softly. “Can he move into a private practice? I don’t know anything about whether you have to do special training to be a general practitioner if you’ve been an ER doctor.”

“He’s been doing the training,” Sarah said with a nod. “Which cuts into his home time, too, and it’s going slowly because he’s trying to study around the ER hours. But he’s also got this underlying belief that if he quits, the entire emergency department will actually fall apart. Institutional guilt, or something.”

“He was always like that,” Megan said. “He was on the student council from seventh grade onward because he couldn’t trust anybody else to do the job right. To his amazement, the school didn’t collapse when he graduated. Even the student government managed to keep staggering along without him. Remind him of that,” she said with a quick smile. “And then he’ll make that ‘you betrayed me’ face at me, and it’ll be great.”

Sarah grinned. “See, this is exactly why I needed to get together with you and talk without him being on the call, too. You’ve got almost four decades worth of ammunition to use against him.”

“Well, between my ammunition and your feminine wiles, maybe you can make him see reason. He’s always wanted to be a dad, though,” Megan added quietly. “He’ll make the change so he doesn’t miss out on that.”

“If it happens.”

“I have a plan for that,” Megan said sagely.

Sarah clapped both hands over her mouth and Megan had to muffle herself to keep a loud laugh from bursting free. “Oh, God, that didn’t come out the way I meant it to.”

“I hope not! I like you, Megan, but I don’t think I need you intimately involved in the job of getting me pregnant!”

Megan waggled her eyebrows. “Just you wait and see.”

The plan for coffee was slightly delayed by needing to stop at Megan’s house to pick up two small, very excited Jack Russells who were no longer really puppies, even if she still thought of them that way. Dip, the male, whose face looked like it had been dipped in chocolate, fell in love with Sarah immediately and collapsed wriggling on her feet. His sister, Thong, who fortunately didn’t have markings to match her name, believed she had slightly more dignity than her brother, and thus sat and waited to be noticed—with her tail thumping at a million miles an hour.

Both of them knew the carrier meant a car ride, which was possibly even more exciting than meeting new people. After Sarah had greeted them with enough enthusiasm to prove her instantaneous love, they scurried into the carrier, curled up around each other, and went to sleep almost before Megan got the carrier into the car. Rafael managed to sleep through all of it, even the dogs’ hopeful whining when they realized there was someone else for them to meet. They stopped for coffee, and Megan got one for Raf in the thermal mug she kept in the car, knowing it would still be hot when he woke up.

The drive in to Dublin from the airport wasn’t a lovely one—the motorway had a lot of tall concrete walls and comparatively little visible countryside—but once they were on the road to Kildare, the rolling green hills Ireland was famous for spread out ahead of them. Sarah gave a contented sigh. “All right, it is beautiful, even if it’s cloudy.”

“Not too bad,” Megan agreed. Even in winter, with many of the fields cut back and gleaming gold instead of green, it was a country of gentle greens, misty grays, and washed blues at the sunlit horizons. That specific soft light was frequently depicted in the paintings and photography of Ireland, although Megan herself had a particular fondness for the sudden glowing clarity after a hard rain beat the mist down, and the sun came out as if to prove it could. They drove in silence a few minutes, and when Megan glanced over, Sarah had rested her head against the window and drifted off into a light sleep that lasted the hour long drive to Kildare.

The well was tucked away just outside of Kildare town, part of a quiet heritage centre and small park that had been built around the holy well. Megan, feeling a little guilty about it, woke her guests, who blinked around blearily for a few minutes before being ready to get out of the car. A priest, recognizable by his collar and rosary, if not the rest of his clothes, walked by as they finally crawled out, and offered them a solemn, quiet smile as if not wanting to disturb the air. Megan gave him a smile in return, and the other two waved sleepily, with Rafael trying to arrange his features into something pleasant and ending up yawning until tears came to his eyes. The priest murmured, “Welcome to Ireland,” and drove off in a car that didn’t look wide enough for his shoulders.

“How’d he know?” Sarah asked around a yawn of her own. “That we’re visitors, I mean?”

“Probably because you’re yawning your brains out while at a tourist attraction,” Megan replied, surprisingly happy. Sarah giggled and yawned again, and Rafael gratefully slurped at his coffee while they woke the dogs and all went trooping past the visitors’ centre to the well. There was an air of ancient faith that carried a serenity of its own in the little park, which had touches of the modern in a beautiful bronze statue of Brigid lifting a flame to the sky, and in the rather practical concrete steps around the nearer part of the well. Megan walked up to a lichen-painted stone arch that she assumed was at least several hundred years old and put her hand against it, surprised to feel warmth. For a heartbeat she actually wondered if there was magic going on, but then realized the priest had probably been standing here himself, and a trace of his body heat hadn’t yet faded.

“Tell me about Brigid,” Sarah said through another yawn. “Oh my God, I’ve got to wake up.”

“I’ll make you walk back to town if you’re not awake in half an hour,” Megan promised, although quietly, finding that, like the priest, she also didn’t want to disturb the site with noise. “Brigid was a goddess in the old Irish pantheon. There’s kind of a debate about whether there was also a human nun named Brigid, or if Catholicism just adapted her to be one of their saints.”

“She’s the patron saint of women?”

Rafael crouched on the concrete steps to draw his fingertips through the cold, still water. “Oh, that’ll wake you up. Think it’s okay to wash my face in the holy well?”

Megan started to answer, but Dip, not at all impressed with human traditions, stuck his nose in the well and took a long, slurping drink that made them all laugh. Thong pranced farther along the green between where the well-feeding stream dipped underground, and a second well some ten meters farther on. “I guess so,” Megan said more loudly, and cheerfully. “Besides, maybe it’s good luck. She was a goddess of fire and childbirth, and . . . maybe something else. I don’t remember.” She hesitated. “Well, it’s the childbirth thing I brought you here for. If you want to try a little ancient Irish magic, anyway.”

Sarah gave her a startled look that turned glassy-eyed, although the tears didn’t quite fall. Rafael stood, shaking water off his hands, and came to put his arms around his wife, who cast a glance up to find him giving her a supportive nod. She nodded, too, looking back at Megan. “I think we’d like that. What do we do?”

Megan gestured to five or six low, rounded standing stones that led in a straight line from the stone arch to the second well, which Thong was snuffling her way to. “It’s a little silly, but I know people who swear it works. You sit on one of the stones and ask Brigid’s intervention to help you get pregnant.”

Both of them paused briefly before Rafael gave a quick laugh. “I assume Sarah does the sitting on the stone. How very . . .”

“Phallic,” Megan said with a rueful grin. “I know. But honestly, I know people who got pregnant after coming here to ask for Brigid’s help, so it can’t hurt to try, right?”

“No, it’s great.” Sarah was still bright-eyed. “What does Raf do?”

He waggled his eyebrows, and Megan hid her face in her hands, like she wasn’t forty-three years old, and could still be mortified by sex. He cackled, and she dropped her hands to grin at him. “He goes to the standing stone with you and asks for Brigid’s help, too, however you two want to make that work. The rest of what he does is entirely up to you, ideally behind closed doors.”

Sarah, almost shining with happiness, stepped out of Rafael’s arms to hug Megan. “I don’t know if I believe in magic or prayer, but I do know that I really love that you thought of this for us. Thank you.” She caught her husband’s hand and tugged him toward the standing stones like they were a couple of kids let loose at a playground.

Megan watched them go, then, feeling that it was all something of a private business, whistled for Dip and went to catch up with Thong. The little dog was leaning over an opening in the farther well’s low stone wall, her tail wagging as she growled and barked at the water in its depths. Megan called, “Shhh,” as quietly as she could, which made about as much difference as she expected it would. She hurried down to the well to reassure Thong that she was only barking at her own reflection.

And then she sat down on the low stone wall and put her head between her knees, trying to fight off dizziness, because there, floating in Saint Brigid’s holy well, was a dead man.

After a count of thirty and three very deep breaths, Megan looked again.

Breathing through it, unfortunately, hadn’t made there be any less of a body in the well.

It was—she thought—a man; the shoulders, where they hung at the surface, were broad, and the shadowed body dipping deeper in the well looked taller than most women. On the other hand, loose, long hair floated across the water, and the body was wearing a loose white dress, wrapped at the waist with some kind of belt and the skirt floating upward. But whatever gender they were, they were definitely dead: Megan and her friends had been poking around the site for at least twenty minutes already. The person in the well had been there awhile.

Thong barked again. Megan picked the little dog up, which seemed to satisfy whatever urge to alert the world that she’d had. She nestled into Megan’s arms, warm and cozy.

That was more than Megan could say for herself. This was the second drowning she’d come upon in the past few years, which was a good solid two too many. She closed her eyes one more time, counted to ten, and wondered what she had done in a previous life to keep finding dead people in this one. Maybe her ex was right after all. Maybe Megan was somehow cursed, or touched by fate, or otherwise doomed to a Jessica Fletcher–like existence.

When she opened her eyes a second time, it was to find Sarah and Rafael with her gaze. They were at the other end of the standing stones, which were about thigh-high. Sarah sat astride one of them, her back to Megan, and Raf, mostly hidden from Megan’s view, knelt in front of her with his arms around her waist. They were both laughing, that shy, nervous giggle people sometimes did when they felt something was both absurd and important. Sarah ducked her head over Raf’s, and although Megan couldn’t hear them speaking, after a moment the quiet laughter stopped, and they simply held on to one another, an intense, private bond that Megan felt pr. . .