Detective Frank Mackey finds himself straight back in the dark tangle of relationships he left behind twenty-two years ago when the suitcase belonging to his first love, Rosie Daly, shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place. The hotly anticipated third novel of the Dublin murder squad.

"The photo on the card shows a boy who was found murdered, a year ago, on the grounds of a girls' boarding school in the leafy suburbs of Dublin. The caption says I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM. Detective Stephen Moran has been waiting for his chance to get a foot in the door of Dublin's Murder Squad--and one morning, sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey brings him this photo. "The Secret Place," a board where the girls at St. Kilda's School can pin up their secrets...

"In the 1880s the Dublin Metropolitan Police classified crime in two distinct classes. Political crimes were classed as 'special,' whereas theft, robbery and even murder ... were known as 'ordinary.' [In] June 1887, the city swelters in a long summer heatwave, the criminal underworld simmers, and with it, the threat of nationalist violence is growing ... Then the mutilated bodies of a man and a child are discovered in Phoenix Park and Detective Sergeant...