Dublin Murders Quotes

Murder calls were never welcome, but this one had a small silver lining.it was going to get Merlin out of a sticky predicament.

Not just the normal back-and-forth. A prickle in the air, a slicing edge. I couldn't tell if it was about her, or just the day that was it, or if it was the squad. Murder is different. The beat goes faster and harder; the tightrope is higher and narrower. One foot wrong, and you're gone.

All those years of endless excruciating therapy sessions, of staying vigilant over every move and word and thought; I had been sure I was mended, all the breaks healed, all the blood washed away. I knew I had earned my way to safety. I had believed, beyond any doubt, that that meant I was safe.

Praise for The Witch Elm “‘I’ve always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person.’ That’s the first line of Tana French’s extraordinary new novel. . . . Here’s a things-go-bad story Thomas Hardy could have written in his prime. . . . The book is lifted by French’s nervy, almost obsessive prose. . . . This is good work by a good writer. For the reader, what luck.” —Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review “Tana French is at her suspenseful best in The Witch Elm. . . . [Her] best and most intricately nuanced novel yet. . . . She is in a class by herself as a superb psychological novelist. . . . Get ready for the whiplash brought on by its final twists and turns.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Like all of her novels, it becomes an incisive psychological portrait embedded in a mesmerizing murder mystery. [French] could make a Target run feel tense and revelatory.” —Los Angeles Times “Like all of French’s novels, The Witch Elm can be swooningly evocative. . . . Even if Toby isn’t on the Dublin Murder Squad, the events in The Witch Elm spur his great, transformative upheaval. The discovery they force on him revolves around one question: Whose story is this? By the time French is done retooling the mystery form—it seems there’s nothing she can’t make it do, no purpose she can’t make it serve—the answer is

Death, investigation, the insanity of a city that ran instead of walked, the smells of a cop shop, the rush and the burden of command. Some of that had become Roarke’s norm in the last couple years, she mused. He juggled that with his own world, which was buying, selling, owning, creating pretty much every freaking thing in the known universe. His beginnings had been as dark and ugly as hers. Dublin street rat, she thought, thief, conniver, survivor of a brutal, murderous father. The mother he’d never known hadn’t been so lucky. From that, he’d built an empire—not always on the sunny side of the law. And she, cop to the bone, had fallen for him despite the shadows— or maybe because of them. But there was more to him than either of them

Given their relationship with the locals and their general enthusiasm level, Doherty and Byrne had been assigned to go through a bazillion hours of closed-circuit TV footage, looking for regular unexplained visitors to Glenskehy, but the cameras hadn’t been positioned with this in mind and the best they could come up with was that they were fairly sure no one had driven into or out of Glenskehy by a direct route between ten and two on the night of the murder. This made Sam start talking about the housemates again, which made Frank point out the multiple ways someone could have got to Glenskehy without being picked up on CCTV, which made Byrne get snippy about suits who swanned down from Dublin and wasted everyone’s time with pointless busywork. I got the sense that the incident room was blanketed by a dense, electric cloud of dead ends and turf wars and that nasty sinking feeling.

Critically, the French investigative team would also be given whatever support they required in Ireland, including full access to the original garda murder file. This ensured that the French investigators would have access to all witness statements, forensic reports, the crime scene photographs and the post-mortem examination file of State Pathologist Professor John Harbison. If the French police team had not had access to the Irish files, an investigation would be fatally compromised from the outset. This granting of access was unprecedented. It also confirmed, beyond any doubt, that no action would ever be taken by the DPP over the garda case file in Ireland. Any such action would be critically undermined from the very start by the fact that access to the file had been given to someone outside the Irish judicial process–and would open any future prosecution, even one taken on the basis of new evidence, to an immediate legal challenge based on a breach of process. While it was never confirmed, the astonishing level of access granted to Magistrate Gachon and his police team was clearly the result of consultations between Paris and Dublin at the very highest levels. Even allowing for existing European judicial and police cooperation protocols, journalists covering the case–including myself–felt the level of access given to the French was astonishing.

And what do you think you’re doing?” he demanded, feeling a large hollowness growing inside him. “You know quite well, don’t you?” replied the crow, hopping up onto the bar with a neat flap of his wings. The bird cocked his head and looked him in the eye. “Don’t tell me an Irishman like you, born and bred in the old country, has forgotten the tale of Cú Chulainn?” “’Tisn’t the sort of thing you can forget,” he told the crow. “Especially that statue in the Dublin General Post Office. A handsome piece of work that is, illustrating how Cú Chulainn knew death was near and tied himself to a post so he could die standing upright, like the hero he was.” “Cú Chulainn was a hero indeed,” admitted the crow. “And his enemies couldn’t kill him until the Morrighan lit on his shoulder, stealing his strength, weakening him…” “Right you are. The Morrighan,” he said. The very thought of that fearsome warrior goddess, with her crimson cloak and chariot, set his heart to pounding in his bony old chest. “And what form did the Morrighan take, might I ask?” inquired the bird. “A crow,” he said, feeling a great trembling overtake him. “So is that it? Are you the Morrighan come for me?” “What do you think Daniel Malone?

Queen Victoria had written to Spencer saying how “most painfully interested” she was in the Dublin examinations. They are quite thrilling. Will the not finding of the knives (which she fears is likely) cause any difficulty in condemning these monsters? She trusts not. What has struck & shocked her, she must say, is the evidence of that gentleman who described (in May) having seen people wrestling—but no more—proving now that he actually saw all & yet never gave the details before. Surely it is very wrong that he did not do so sooner. A few days later, she impatiently quizzed Harcourt, “Is there any further news? The Queen sees that Mrs. Byrne (who must be a worthy mate of such a Husband), was taken on Sunday.