Garda Siobhan O’Sullivan has big news to share with her family, but before she can figure out how to break the news of her engagement, she gets a call from Macdara Flannery, also a Garda officer. His cousin Jane Delaney had called him very upset, and he asked Siobhan to join him on a trip to the tiny village of Ballysiogdun to collect Jane and find out what happened.

Although Jane is an adult, she is legally blind, so she was still living at home with her mother. She’d been out of town for a conference, and when she’d returned home she knew immediately that something was wrong. That was when she’d called Macdara.

When Siobhan and Macdara make their way to the cottage where Jane and her mother Ellen lived, it didn’t take them long to see the signs of foul play. A broken window, the posed body of Macdara’s aunt, and a single gold coin on the floor.

But all the villagers could talk about was what had happened overnight. Some had seen bright lights. Some had heard a banshee scream. Some saw a lone figure running. But they all know exactly what had happened: the nearby fairies had expressed their unhappiness once again by taking the life of a resident of the cottage. The cottage Ellen and Jane had lived in was right between two fairy trees, and everyone knows how the Good People (the fairies) didn’t like for anyone to be in their way.

But Siobhan doesn’t believe that. While she has respect for the stories of Irish elders, she knows that whatever it was that people had heard that night, or what they thought they had seen, it was a flesh and blood human being who murdered Ellen. And that killer was still in their midst.

Murder in an Irish Cottage is the fifth book in the Irish Village Mystery series by Carlene O’Connor, and anyone who’s had the good fortune to read any of the wonderful books in this series knows that Garda Siobhan O’Sullivan will not be stopped until she gets her man.

I love the Irish Village Mysteries. I have long been a fan of Siobhan and her fiery Irish determination to set things right. I love that she works as a police officer while also helping her siblings run their late mother’s cafe, especially with her being the one to go in every morning and bake their signature brown bread. There is so much love in this series for family and for truth, each book is completely charming to me from the first page to the last.

I especially loved Murder in an Irish Village for its talk of the legend of the fairies. The fairy trees and rings, the beauty of the countryside, the storytelling—it made me want to take a trip there more than ever. But until I can make that happen, I can read the books in this series and feel for a few hours that I’ve gotten a taste of Ireland and its people.

Galleys for Murder in an Irish Cottage were provided by Kensington Books through NetGalley, with many thanks, but I was also lucky enough to win a copy through a Goodreads giveaway.