Cold-blooded murder - new book looks at macabre Irish cases

‘Blue Murder’, ‘She’ll murder me’, ‘I could murder a pint’. Murder it seems comes to lips pretty readily in Ireland, fortunately much less so in reality, compared to many other countries. That said, for Irish people there is an enduring and unshakeable fascination with crime – witness the huge popularity of thrillers, crime and true crime books. We also seem to be pretty good at writing about it with international bestsellers such as John Connolly, Tana French, Benjamin Black (aka John Banville) and Liz Nugent. In Allen Foster’s Book of Irish Murders, he feeds this fascination by unearthing some of the most unusual, curious and macabre crimes across three centuries from Cork to Carrickfergus, Monaghan to Malahide, including cases in Trim and Navan.

Bestselling author Allen Foster returns with some of Ireland’s most infamous and lesser-known murders in history.  From the murder of a teacher in his schoolyard and an ambush by dancing masked men, to the Sherlock Holmes-like investigation into the death of WWII veteran James McParland, and many more! Uncover the details behind strange cases, such as how an afternoon slice of cake led to James Finnegan’s demise, how one man’s dream led to mysterious death being solved, and how a woman’s corpse seemingly fell from the sky in Clare. 

Foster’s Book of Irish Murder, which features close to forty cases, is full of victims and monsters, heroic detectives and false leads, killers escaping justice and mysterious deadly crimes – that remain unsolved to this day.

Allen Foster is originally from Dublin and works as a researcher and writer and freelance journalist. He previously wrote a biography of the eccentric American George Francis Train, inspiration for Jules Verne’s classic fictional hero Phileas Fogg, Around the World with Citizen Train, as well as a series of curious miscellany books including the bestselling Foster’s Irish Oddities, Foster’s Even Odder Irish Oddities and Foster’s Historical Irish Oddities. 

He currently lives on a dairy farm in Enfield, and loves finding unjustly forgotten and unusual tales from Irish history. Over the course of time he realised how many strange Irish murder cases there were and began investigating them. His extensive research into Irish homicides did not extend to personal experiments – although at times his publisher threatened a murder if he did not hurry up and finish the book!

Published in hard back Foster’s murderous miscellany is available across Ireland in bookshops, online and from www.newisland.ie, RRP €14.95/£12.99