Beautifully written, brilliantly plotted and cleverly concluded, Gill's fourteenth Peter McGarr mystery is an uncommon pleasure... Ireland, rich in history, rife with divisions and riddled with contradictions, provides a glowing background to this deeply absorbing novel, but the complexity of the characters and the subtlety of the author prove most satisfying.

Crime runs rampant in the picturesque town of Leixleap- and on Ireland's famed River Shannon, where brazen thieves illegally harvest the gourmet-prized eels that flourish there. But while poaching may be something the local Eel Police division is well-equipped to handle, murder is wholly another matter.

Chief Inspector Peter McGarr has been called out from Dublin to investigate a troubling double homicide. The nude body of young, pretty, and recently married Eel Policewoman Ellen Gilday Finn has been discovered in the bed of a hot-sheet inn-wrapped around the equally unclothed corpse of her much older boss, Pascal Burke. A crime of passion, perhaps, pointing to Ellen's cuckolded newly wedded husband as the perpetrator. But conflicting clues and false confessions are leading McGarr into dangerous hidden corners where greed, corruption, IRA terror and radical, possibly deadly, environmentalism are but a few of the dark blooms secretly nourished in the rich loam of the Irish countryside.