Irish Whiskey – A Nuala Anne McGrail Novel
Andrew M. Greeley
Tom Doherty Associates, 1998, 317 pp.
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ISBN: 0-312-85596-6
With their wedding two weeks away, Dermot Coyne and Nuala Anne McGrail have their hands full with problem relatives, a seventy year old murder mystery and a new investigation by the authorities into the commodities transaction that is the foundation of Dermot's financial independence.
While accompanying Dermot on a visit to his grandparent's grave, the fey in Nuala Anne "sees" that the nearby grave of a bootlegger, who was killed in a shootout in Chicago in 1927, is empty.
James "Sweet Rolls" Sullivan had owned a bakery in Chicago as well as being involved in bootlegging and other organized crime activities. He got himself killed while opposing Al Capone's take over of Chicago crime. But did he really die in a gunfight in 1927? Nuala Anne's "sighting" launches her and Dermot on a quest to find the real facts of the case and, in the process they encounter some dangerous people who, seventy years after the shooting, are still not anxious to have light shed on this case.
If solving a seventy year old mystery, which some people don't want solved, was not enough, the Feds launch an investigation into trading practices on the Chicago Board of Trade. An old acquaintance of Dermot, in an attempt to deflect attention away from his own part in the scandal, tries to implicate Dermot. This gives Dermot an additional challenge as he defends himself against the charges brought against him.
Like the two previous novels in this series, Irish Gold and Irish Lace, Greeley uses the same formula of the growing love between Nuala Anne and Dermot, a historical mystery and a current mystery. But unlike the other two novels which involved real historical mysteries, this story uses the Prohibition era in Chicago as a backdrop but the incident and characters are fictional. But it makes for a good story anyway. The novel is fast paced and at the end the reader is looking forward to the next novel in the series.
The review of this Book prepared by Chuck Nugent
