No Comfort for the Dead

by R.P. O'Donnell

Genres: General Fiction; Mystery; Historical Mysteries; International Crime & Mystery; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

After witnessing a murder, a small-town librarian is forced to act when the local police arrest the wrong man, perfect for fans of Dervla McTiernan and Carlene O’Connor.

1988, West Cork, Ireland. Emma Daly has returned to her home in Castlefreke, a small and peaceful village where everybody knows everybody. She has taken over the local library and is trying not to think about the scandal she left behind in the city. But when the richest man in the village is murdered and the main suspect is the mysterious son of a local family, her charming small-town life is turned upside down. 

Emma knows for a fact that there is more to the story, and when the family asks her to investigate, she decides to take matters into her own hands. 

Teaming up with a stubborn widow, an elderly hypochondriac, and her high school sweetheart, it is up to Emma to solve the mystery before either the police or the murderer can stop her. 

Release date: February 11, 2025

Publisher: Crooked Lane Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

Prologue

When Ophelia arrived in Castlefreke, she ripped the front shutters off the parish hall. A few shingles from the old creamery came loose, and she threw them, shrieking, into Myross Wood and the Blackfield pitch. Wind and rain and the high crack of thunder—Ophelia made herself known.

Castlefreke was a quiet village, the quiet only broken by the constant refrain: God, it’s awfully quiet here, isn’t it? Or, from the younger crowd, by the constant complaint: Nothing ever happens here.

In 1988, in Castlefreke, there were rumors and a rumbling of trouble up North—but that was Northern business. Belfast could’ve been on the other side of the world for all the village knew. When the village talked about crime, they meant the price of milk or masturbation. There had never been a murder in Castlefreke, as far as anyone knew or could remember.

No, while Ireland itself was at a crossroads, in Castlefreke, life was the same as it always was. Round and round went the villagers, minding their own business, and the business of their neighbors—the kind of village where nothing ever happened.

The villagers left Ophelia to herself and closed their windows and doors against her; outside, she threw their coal bins and drying racks and football nets into the road.

But in the front room of the Big House on the top of the hill, an old man paced nervously. It wasn’t the storm that scared him. It was the noise at the door—loud enough to cut through the rattling of the windows and the pounding of the rain. A knock on the door, steady and insistent.

Could it be? the old man wondered. No, no, it’s not possible—

Unless …

And then, the door slammed open.

By the time Ophelia left the next morning, two fishing boats had capsized and half the village was flooded, from the old pier all the way down to the front door of Nolan’s pub. There were trees down everywhere. Anything that hadn’t been tied down was floating or flown apart.

And the old man lay dead on the floor of the front room of the Big House on the top of the hill—a single gunshot through his heart.

Trouble, it seemed, had finally come to Castlefreke.

Chapter One

The Castlefreke Library was usually a quiet place after closing. Especially after dark, when the aisles filled with shadows and the bookshelves muffled the dusty clock ticking and the creak of the warm walls settling against the cold night. The library fell asleep. Usually.

Tonight, however, there was another sound: the sound of steady but undignified snoring. Not the gentle snoring you might expect—like the heavy breathing of a middle-aged woman in church, for example, or a small pug—but rather, this was the full-mouthed eruptions of a woman who has clearly worked too hard.

The head librarian, Emma Daly, was twenty-six years old, and on the slight side—her habit of wearing her dad’s old cardigans added to the impression of smallness. Her copper hair was cropped short, framing a pale face and dark green eyes, freckles spreading high under her cheekbones. But at the moment, judging purely from the sound coming out of her—a passerby would be excused for thinking there was a rabid dog loose in the library.

Emma’s head was on the front desk, her left cheek smudging the paperwork she had been working on. Her tape recorder hissed as it continued turning, the last of her dictation trailing off into heavy breathing. Her cup of tea had turned cold and gray, and her cigarette had burned itself out in another mug long ago.

Dear Board of Trustees, the paper beneath her head started, The papers have been printing the obituary for rural Ireland for twenty years now. Always the same reasons, always the same excuses. But why hasn’t it died? It’s because of places like the Castlefreke Library. For only 100 pounds per month, you can help …

Emma often fell asleep at her desk—she stayed hours past closing most nights. Her colleague, Maeve, often protested, insisting that the work could wait until the morning. But Emma always insisted right back. The library balanced on a razor’s edge; it had only survived due to an endless stream of grants, extensions, charters, blessings—all applied to and fought for by Emma. In triplicate. She’d only been manager for three years, but now, she was the little boy with her finger in the dam. Without her, it was lost.

It wasn’t just the library. The whole village was in trouble. Most of the shops had closed, and the rest were on borrowed time. Even the parish hall was closed for half the year now. It was only the library that held the village together, that brought some life back into the deadened streets. A rock in the stream. Some hope of weathering the tide. All built by Emma.

In three years, she’d transformed the library from a glorified storage cupboard into the backbone of the community. And Maeve and Sam, Emma’s dad, had to agree—as much as they wished she would just get some sleep.

But they also knew that pride wasn’t the real reason she worked late.

And so, every night, Emma stayed past closing—filling out forms and fundraising and writing essays on footfall and lending rates. It was like bureaucratic meditation; she worked until she fell asleep at her desk. And if that didn’t work, she took long walks around the village and countryside at night, staring up at the stars until her legs couldn’t walk any further.

In between snores that sounded like a half-hearted stroke, there was a knock. Outside, on the library door. Once … twice … then a bit louder. Finally, Emma woke up, the sheet of paper sticking to her cheek for a moment.

And before she came to her senses fully, before she completely stepped back out of the dream—she heard it. Hot panicky breath nestling in close to her ear. A small voice breaking apart. And then the room came into focus, and the door in her heart fell open.

---

The last of Ophelia had

raged and pounded on the windows all morning, but it was quiet as Emma stepped outside. The air was still and calm—and all the more so for having been so wild before, like a child sleeping after a tantrum.

Emma’s dad, Sam, waited as she locked the door behind her. Unlike his daughter, Sam was tall and ran burly. He had a full, dark beard and most of his hair. He was a carpenter by trade, but a collector by nature. His pockets were always full of odds and ends he’d found on walks—delicately colored eggshells, for example, or old coins. Tonight, Emma saw his pockets were slightly damp, suggesting whatever he’d found had been wet.

“Sorry to wake you,” he said brightly, “I thought you might need a torch.” He waited as she lit a cigarette. “Jesus, you should see the lane. Two trees down across the way, and half the road underwater.”

“What about the Bridge?”

“Fecked,” he said cheerfully. “The Council are going to have their work cut out for them.” He seemed almost delighted at the prospect. “Flooded on both sides, with a couple of big branches in the middle. Nobody’s getting across that bridge for a few days.”

There was only one main road in and out of Castlefreke—the Bridge. The Bridge was so narrow that only one car could fit on it at once, but it was better than the alternative: the winding labyrinth of unmarked country roads, split by grass and covered in cow shit. And those were the good roads—others were closer to a rumor than a road.

Sam was about to say something, but he saw Emma’s face, and a blotchiness that wasn’t just from exhaustion.

“Bad night, love?” he asked gently.

She nodded. Her eyes were jittery and bright, and didn’t catch hold of anything, like an anchor trying to catch on stone.

She stood there for a while without saying anything. He waited.

After a minute, Emma took a deep breath. She pulled her jacket around her and smiled at him. It had passed.

“God, I could murder a cup of tea,” she said, as she linked arms with Sam, and they made their way through the village, toward the hill and home.

In the village center, small and brightly painted houses lined the street, close together, like a family on a couch. There was a bright moon overhead; the country lanes wandered off, like dark and lovely visitors to townlands like Ballincolla and the surrounding fields. The hedgerows divided the land into small fields and the fishing boats swung slowly out of the harbor. Everywhere you looked, the world was full of Ophelia’s rain.

Sam cursed as he stepped into a puddle.

“Where’s that torch you brought me?” Emma laughed, knowing full well that he’d only come to wake her up.

“I said I thought you might need a torch, not that I brought you one.” He looked pointedly at her bag. “And what did you bring for me?”

Emma often took home books from the library—it was how she and Sam spent most evenings, quietly reading in front of the stove.

“Is Hamlet a bit too on the nose?”

He groaned and she laughed, and soon they were home.

---

Emma and Sam lived 

in a house on top of the hill. The front looked out over the village and across the harbor; the rest was surrounded by hills and fields and an incompetent farmer who refused to cut a drain.

After they stamped their feet on the mat and threw their coats on the table (revealing the small bits of quartz Sam had found on his walk), Sam stuck their dinner in the oven. While they waited, they settled into their usual places in front of the stove.

“Why’d the storm have a name?” Emma asked. “And why Ophelia? If you’re going to name a storm, that one seems a bit …”

“Insensitive?” Sam asked, finishing her thought. “Why would you name a storm after somebody who drowned, you ask? Answer: because Americans are idiots.”

Emma laughed.

“Da—you can’t say that.”

Sam shrugged.

“I don’t think they’d mind. Hell, they’d probably agree.” He marked his page and closed his book. “The storm was supposed to hit America. By the time they realized it wasn’t going to hit them, or come anywhere close, they’d already named it.”

Emma frowned. Last time she checked, America was 2,000 miles away.

“Thats a pretty big miss, no?”

Sam shook his head.

“Happens all the time, and not just to the Americans. In fairness, look what happened in England last year—with your man Michael Fish. The English fecked it up too.” He picked up the jug of milk; finding it empty (and shooting a reproachful look at Emma’s tea, where the last few drops had disappeared) he got up to refill it. As he walked over to the kitchen, he stopped and patted her shoulder. “Nobody can predict the future, Emma. Not even the people getting paid to.”

She sighed, knowing exactly what he was going to say next, and willing him not to. It was a conversation—a monologue, really—they’d already had a million times. He opened the cupboards and started rummaging through them. But she knew he was just winding up for the usual sales pitch. And sure enough, a few seconds later, it came.

“And, you know,” he said casually, “speaking of the future … I was talking to Miss McGready at the shop earlier, and she said she was going to be renting a few flats in the City this spring …”

“Actually, I’m going to go for a walk,” she said, cutting him off abruptly. Without waiting for a response, she got up and grabbed her coat off the table, moving quickly toward the door. But Sam was too quick for her.

“I know you don’t want to talk about it,” he said, stepping in front of her and putting his hands up. “And God knows I love having you here, but you must’ve walked a million miles to run away from this conversation.” He shook his head stubbornly. “It’s been four years since you moved back from the City. You’re too young to be stuck here.”

Emma squared up, ready to tell him off, to tell him that she wasn’t stuck, she was fighting … but all at once, a weariness set in. Like a drain pulled on a bathtub. She let her shoulders hang.

“I’m trying, Dad.” Her voice cracked slightly. “I’m trying my best.”

Sam pulled her into a hug.

“I know it’s been hard,” he said, squeezing her tight, “I know. But you can’t freeze yourself in time.” Then, he took a deep breath, and held her at arm’s length. “I know you don’t want to hear it. But it’s time to move on—”

All at once, Emma was out of his arms and out the door. The night’s cool air crept into the warm house; the distant sound of fog bells rolled across the harbor.

Sam hung his head. He knew better than to follow her. She was just past the gate already. He let her go.

“Will I have your dinner

in the oven?” he called to her.

At a distance, he couldn’t tell if she was debating whether or not to ignore him or to come back in altogether—the chill in the air would’ve stopped most people. Finally, she called over her shoulder.

“Yes, please!”

---

Emma didn’t head off in any particular direction other than not toward the village. Her hands were shaking, but she could see well enough in the moonlight to find her usual path up past the corner of Christy’s field and up again toward the Blackfield.

Myross Wood ran down from the left to the water’s edge and collapsed, as if exhausted, into the sea. The Bridge stepped lightly from around the corner, across the harbor to Glandore. The twin islands, Adam and Eve, looked joined, like Emma could walk across them as one hill until she finally came back to Castlefreke, tangled up among the nets and bells and bilge pumps of the old pier where the fishing boats waited patiently: red, yellow, and blue. She could still see the destruction of Ophelia—two of the smaller boats were underwater—but the rest of the pier was busy under the sodium lights. The fishermen drifted from the stove and their cups of tea—half warm and half drunk—to the ships that would carry them to Georges Bank and the Flemish Cap.

Emma knew her dad loved her and meant well. She knew Sam wasn’t pushing her to leave—he loved their routine as much as she did. But he didn’t understand. And if he didn’t understand, then she wasn’t sure anybody could.

The path came out from the trees on a slight rise. She was way out in the country now, in the big fields and dark woods where houses were rare. She could only see one now, in a field down below her through the trees. It was the Big House.

Emma always felt safe in Castlefreke, even on a dark lane like this one. But every so often, a line from Sherlock Holmes popped up out of nowhere. (Not exactly nowhere, of course—her anthology of the Adventures was falling apart, and it was her third one.) It was a throwaway line—how the lonely houses of the country, each in its own field, were filled with more horrors than any of the darkest alleyways in London. Because in the country, Sherlock argued, nobody could hear you scream.

Emma shuddered; it was as jarring now as it was when she was twelve years old and living in one of those lonely houses in the country. A loving, peaceful house, of course, but lonely in its field. They lived on the edge of the village now, but every so often, on a night like this, as she stared out the window, down the hill, and across the field to the village stirring restlessly in the rain, she sometimes wondered. Was Sherlock right? Was there something terrible happening? Somewhere behind those curtains, somewhere in the darkness of the house, was there a fire burning—?

A noise broke her reverie. It was coming from the house just beyond the trees—the sound of shouting. The house was dark, and at this distance the words were muffled, but it was definitely shouting. Angry, too.

Emma frowned. Mr. Hollis lived alone in the Big House—he was an old man, and not the type to be entertaining late at night. People said he hadn’t even left the house in over ten years. As Emma considered whether or not to go down and knock on the door, a sudden CRACK split the air. And then a cry of pain.

A gunshot. Rifle—.38

caliber?

It came from inside the house.

Emma flattened herself on the ground and crawled forward to the tree line. Her heart was pounding, her mind racing, but her body was on autopilot, tensed and ready for action.

A second CRACK.

Emma had made the tree line now; this time she saw the orange flash behind the window, against the darkness of the window.

Different this time. Not a rifle. Pistol—maybe a .45 caliber?

Different gun.

She stayed as still as she could, keeping her eyes focused on the house. Data, data, give me data! Sherlock Holmes shouted in her mind. An engine needs coal, damn it!

She took a deep breath and blocked out the shouting fictional cokehead. She focused on the real world, and what she had learned in another life, in the Academy.

Deep breaths. Quiet your mind. Take stock of the situation.

Two guns—that means at least two people. There could be more. Exits? From this vantage point, she could only count one door and three windows, but she had a clear line of view to the surrounding tree line. She’d see if anyone left.

If you can’t help—collect evidence.

Well, she couldn’t help. She didn’t have a gun, for starters. She could call the guards, but the closest phone was back in the village at Nolan’s pub—the council had been promising to repair the two public phone boxes for three years and these days, most of the village hadn’t paid their phone bills—so the phone at Nolan’s had become a major part of the village infrastructure. But it was a long walk from here.

The front door of the house slammed open. A man stood in the dark doorway, looking all around him. For a moment, Emma thought he might see her, or worse, start to head in her direction. It was too dark; she couldn’t make out any features, just a silhouette. He was tall, over six feet—he seemed well-built, but a long coat mixed unevenly with the shadows and made it impossible to tell for sure. He stood there for a second, listening, and then he ran off toward the woods in the opposite direction and was gone.

Every muscle in Emma’s body screamed against the silence; her whole body ached from tension and the cold wet ground. But she waited. Her heart pounded, but her breath, visible now in the night air, was steady. She couldn’t hear anything in the woods or see any movement from the house—all she could hear was the roar of what sounded like the ocean in her ears. But she waited.

After what she guessed was five minutes, Emma stood up and slowly made her way to the house, padding softly across the dark loam, ready to hit the ground again if she needed to. There was nothing but silence. She made it to the side of the house and looked through the window. And then she gasped.

There in the middle of the dark room was an old man. He was sprawled out on the floor, eyes open, frozen, staring at the ceiling. Blood was blooming from a hole in his chest and from under his back; it pooled on the floor beneath him and there was more splattered on the wall behind him. He wasn’t moving.

She had never met

the man, but she knew—it was Mr. Hollis. Mr. Hollis was dead.

Emma heard a low moan coming from the back of the room. It was too dark to see clearly, but she could make out the silhouette of a body slumped against the wall. She could see movement.

The man was clearly alive, but badly hurt. He needed a doctor.

And the guards.

Right as she was about to leave, she did a double take. Above her, the moon shifted, and gray light spread across the man’s face. And for a second, as she took in his figure, she thought—she nearly swore—that it was Charley Thornton. But it couldn’t be. Charley was younger, and he was gone, long gone. No, no—

The man groaned again and raised his arm. He was still slumped against the wall, and he wasn’t trying to get up. But that didn’t matter. Because Emma saw what he held in his hand—a gun. And it was pointed right at her.

Chapter Two

Emma knew the country lanes like the back of her hand. She could have run down from the Big House to the village blindfolded. Which was good because that was essentially what she was doing now.

Night in the countryside, far away from any city or light bulb brighter than a sixty-watt, the dark is like a heavy blanket. It has a weight and a texture; you have to push your way through it.

The moon had disappeared behind a dark bank of clouds. There were no stars to speak of. Emma ran through the darkness, all the way down to the village, until she saw the light.

---

Adam Thornton, the village doctor, had a difficult job. It wasn’t just the house calls or the long hours or even the hard decisions—and occasional mistakes—that made it hard. It was his proximity to the community he served.

He was their doctor, but he was also their neighbor. This came with complications.

Some complications, of course, involved payment. Adam kept his rates affordable, and he was unusually patient and kind—he understood that his patients struggled. But still, since most of his patients were fishermen, they couldn’t afford even his cheapest rates.

So, Adam was mainly paid in fish.

His family ate fish every night of the week—and sometimes for lunch too. (After his son, Charley, moved out, he never ate fish again—he figured he’d eaten enough cod to last him three lifetimes.)

The other complication—the major complication, if you asked Adam—was his neighbors’ concern for privacy around a fellow neighbor. Even if that fellow neighbor was their doctor. It came in two extremes.

In his office, they’d act withholding. Patients stood in his office, spouting or spewing from one orifice or another, ...