Pub owner Maura Donovan may have Irish kin, but she doesn’t seem to have the luck of the Irish. Who could have foreseen that bringing live music back to Sullivan’s Pub would lead to a dead musician? Summer is ending in County Cork, Ireland, and with it the tourist season. Expat Maura Donovan is determined to keep Sullivan’s Pub in the black as the days grow shorter—but how? When she hears that the place was once a hot spot for Irish musicians who’d come play in the back room, she wonders if bringing back live music might be Sullivan’s salvation. As word gets out, legendary musicians begin to appear at the pub, and the first impromptu jam session brings in scores of music lovers. But things hit a sour note when Maura finds a dead musician in the back room the next morning. With a slew of potential suspects, it’s going to take more than a pint and a good think to force a murderer to face the music. Praise for the  New York Times  Bestselling County Cork Mystery series: "'Tis a grand thing...The prolific Sheila Connolly...pays tribute to her Irish heritage...Connolly invests this leisurely series opener with a wealth of Irish color and background." -- Richmond Times-Dispatch "Another winner of a series...Connolly's latest is a captivating tale--sweet, nostalgic, and full of Irish charm, but also tightly plotted and full of twists, turns, and shocking reveals." --The Maine Suspect "[A] well-set and nicely paced cozy." -- Library Journal "The Irish countryside continues to enchant...Maura is a strong lead character, near perfect." --MyShelf.com Sheila Connolly  is the  New York Times  bestselling, Anthony and Agatha award nominated author of the Orchard Mysteries, the Museum Mysteries, and the County Cork Mysteries. She has taught art history; structured and marketed municipal bonds for major cities; worked as a staff member on two statewide political campaigns; and served as a fundraiser for several nonprofit organizations. Sheila also managed her own consulting company, providing genealogical research services. In addition to genealogy, she loves restoring old houses, visiting cemeteries, and traveling. Now a full-time author, Sheila thinks writing mysteries is a lot more fun than any of her previous occupations. She is married and has one daughter and three cats. Acknowledgments Chapter 1 Maura Donovan looked at the piles of paper spread out on her well-worn kitchen table and despaired. For six months now she’d been running Sullivan’s, a small pub in a small town in County Cork, Ireland, and she had no idea if she’d made any money at all. She knew how to handle the day-to-day stuff like tending bar—she’d been doing that since she was legally old enough (and maybe a bit before), back in Boston where she’d grown up—but running a business was a different matter. At least it had been a good summer with nice weather, and the place had been well filled some nights. Not so well filled on others. She’d heard it was the poor economy everywhere that was keeping the tourists from other countries home watching their own pennies, but it was hard to get by with only the locals as customers. And even here in Leap there was plenty of competition, particularly from the inn across the street, plus the new bistro that just opened down the road—and even more competition in nearby Skibbereen, a thriving market town seven miles down the road and with ten times the population of Leap. All of which was why Maura had been putting off doing the numbers for Sullivan’s. She didn’t have a computer or spreadsheets—just invoices and bank statements and lots of scraps of paper with scrawls that she couldn’t even read. She had taken a couple of accounting classes back in Boston, but she’d never liked them and hadn’t paid a lot of attention then. She’d paid the salaries of her employees—Mick, Jimmy, and Jimmy’s daughter, Rose—but they were all part-time and worked erratic schedules, adjusting their hours from day to day or week to week. How her employees managed to live on what she paid them, she did not know, but closing down wasn’t an option: she was pretty sure Mick could find himself another job, but she had her doubts about Jimmy. Jimmy was good at bantering with customers but when it came time to swap out the kegs of Guinness or wash up on a busy night, he always seemed to disappear. Then there was his daughter, Rose, who’d only recently turned seventeen, a sweet, bright girl who had little future in the small village but no plans to leave her father to fend for himself. Good for Jimmy, bad for Rose. Worse, there were hardly any young people Rose’s age around: they’d all gone off looking for work in other places, not that Maura could blame them. The young men in particular seemed to have gone the farthest, not only to England or Spain but even to Australia. Maura wanted the girl to have a life of her own, but she couldn’t offer much guidance, certainly not based on her own patchy history. Besides, she was still learning the