Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told

A writer's return to his childhood home in rural Ireland leads to an investigation of two deaths decades earlier, in this "entertaining murder mystery" (Publishers Weekly).

When journalist Patrick Bracken returns to Gohen, the Irish farming village where he was born, he knows the townspeople are watching him closely. He's come back to investigate two suspicious deaths—one victim being a Catholic missionary priest—that occurred more than half a century earlier, when Patrick was a child. But Patrick knows—and believes the whole town knows—that those accidents were murders. He knows because he witnessed the whole thing.
Though the lush green countryside of the close-knit community looks welcoming, no one in town is particularly forthcoming—except eighty-year-old Sam Howard, and his effusive, loving, and gossipy wife. Sam was the lawyer who conducted the inquest into the death of Father Coughlin and a local farmer, and after all this time the deaths still bother the spry old man. So does the collective silence of the people of Gohen. But for Patrick and Sam, a trip down memory lane has its stumbling blocks. Because what's been happening in Gohen isn't just a cover-up, it's a conspiracy. And unearthing it could be as lethal as digging up the wrong mushroom.

"A masterful portrait of Irish village life," Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told is about the bond that can hold a community together and the secrets that can tear it apart (Shelf Awareness).