The local pub offers warm respite,'with locals coming together for a wee tipple, some jaunty reels, and a'bit of gossip, all of which serve as key social lubricants in a village'that scarcely warrants a dot on the map. Our setting is Galway, Ireland, a place of damp bogs and mires, of thick'grass fed by constant drizzling rain. Haunted Earth is quite the decent read indeed. And while for the first few chapters this seemed'to be a justified position, I was rather quickly disabused of my snooty'position. Haunted Earth is a debut novel, and despite the fact that spoke to a'number of my interests, I have to admit that my expectations were'initially rather low. A'mere train trip to a small country town later, and I was sadly flipping'through the last few pages, returning from chilly Ireland with its thick'food and thicker accents to a humid Malaysian train carriage that offered instead a'television blaring a karaoke channel and the ripe-garbage smell'of durian. (Perhaps the bookshop attendant was making'some small claim to its potential to be a bestseller.) Regardless, its'blurb spoke of bog bodies, Irish music, and a modern day murder, three'things that for some reason set my little readerly heart aflutter. It was'one of only a few English language books on offer in a Malay-language'bookshop, and was positioned rather beguilingly between Malay versions'of Harry Potter and Twilight. I have to admit this book was a rather unintentional read: I picked it'up whilst travelling in Malaysia, having, run out of material to read'after a few days spent lazing about on a beach in Kota Kinabalu. Did Mina simply decide to disappear, or did mother and child become lost in the treacherous bog? Could they, too, be hidden in its depths, only to be discovered centuries from now? Or did the landowner, Hugh Osborne, murder his family, as some villagers suspect? Two years earlier, Mina Osborne, the local landowners Indian-born wife, went for a walk with her young son and never returned.

Still, her tale may have shocking ties to the present, and Cormac and Nora must use cutting-edge techniques to preserve ancient evidence.Īnd the red-haired girl is not the only enigma in this remote corner of Galway. The red-haired girl is clearly a case for the archaeologists, not the police. Who is she? When was she killed? The extraordinary find leads to even more disturbing puzzles. Peat bogs prevent decay, so the decapitated young woman could have been buried for two decades, two centuries, or even much longer. Blurb: When farmers cutting turf in a peat bog make a grisly discovery the perfectly preserved severed head of a young woman with long red hair Irish archaeologist Cormac Maguire and American pathologist Nora Gavin team up in a case that will open old wounds.

Haunted Ground by Erin Hart