Introducing the Reverend Mother Aquinas in the first of a brand-new historical mystery series. Cork, Ireland. 1923. When, one wet March morning, Reverend Mother Aquinas discovers a body at the gate of the convent chapel washed up after a flood ‘like a mermaid in gleaming silver satin’, she immediately sends for one of her former pupils, Police Sergeant Patrick Cashman, to investigate. Dead bodies are not unusual in the poverty-stricken slums of Cork city, but this one is dressed in evening finery; in her handbag is a dance programme for the exclusive Merchant’s Ball held the previous evening – and a midnight ticket for the Liverpool ferry. Against the backdrop of a country in the midst of Ireland’s Civil War, the Reverend Mother, together with Sergeant Cashman and Dr Sher, an enlightened physician and friend, seek out the truth as to the identity of the victim – and her killer. "Harrison combines a savvy detective and a setting fraught with intrigue and tension for another winner" ― Publishers Weekly Starred Review “Mistaken identities, strange twists, an intelligent and likable heroine, and a tragic tale of sex, greed, and betrayal―make sure your historical mystery readers get this one on their radar” ― Booklist Starred Review "This is a terrific read, carrying you along on the ride. Highly recommended." -- Historical Novel Society "Recommend for Dicey Deere fans or readers who enjoy M.C. Beaton and Carol Higgins Clark” ― Library Journal "What unfolds is a superbly crafted mystery that makes fine use of its locale and the diverse characters living there: the moneyed elite who attend the annual Merchants’ Ball, lecturers from the University College, and the energetic young people who fight for Ireland’s future by joining the illegal Republican Party." -- Sarah Johnson, book review editor for the Historical Novels Review. Cora Harrison published twenty-six children's books before turning to adult novels with the ‘Mara’ series of Celtic historical mysteries set in 16th century Ireland. Cora lives on a farm near the Burren in the west of Ireland. A Shameful Murder By Cora Harrison Severn House Publishers Limited Copyright © 2015 Cora Harrison All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-7278-8511-1 CHAPTER 1 St Thomas Aquinas: Videtur quod voluntas Dei non sit causa rerum. (It can be seen that the will of God is not the cause of things.) It was Reverend Mother Aquinas who found the body of the dead girl. It lay wedged within the gateway to the convent chapel at St Mary's of the Isle, jettisoned by the flood waters. For a fanciful moment she had almost imagined that it was a mermaid swept up from the sea. The long silver gown gleamed beneath the gas lamp, wet as the skin of a salmon, and the streams of soaked curls were red-brown just like the crinkled carrageen seaweed she had gathered from the windswept beaches of Ballycotton when she was a child. Her heart beating fast, the Reverend Mother unlocked the gate and looked down at the sightless blue eyes that stared up from beneath a wide high brow at the blanched, soaked flesh of the cheeks and knew that there was nothing that she could do for the girl. She bent over, touched the stone-cold face and then with a hand that trembled slightly she signed the forehead with a small cross. The Reverend Mother had seen death many times in her long life, but in the young she still found it was almost unbearable. She straightened up and looked around. There was no one near. She had left the convent hurriedly, gone out into the fog, unable to bear with patience the sanctimonious comments of Sister Mary Immaculate about the floods being the will of God. Reverend Mother Aquinas, like her namesake, the great philosopher Thomas Aquinas, had no belief in the doctrine of the will of God – it was, for her, just an easy way out, of excusing man's inhumanity, inefficiency and lack of social responsibility. These terrible floods would not happen season after season if some of the wealth of the city was spent on preventing them. Sister Mary Immaculate, she thought with irritation, would not have been so quick to trot out the customary platitude about God's will if she, like the families of the children who attended the school of St Mary's of the Isle, lived in one of those crowded crumbling buildings flooded with sewage by the overflowing drains. As always it was the poor who had suffered. The rich moved to the hills outside the city. Floods were nothing new in Cork. The city had been built on a marsh, criss-crossed by streams, beginning with a small monastic settlement, named St Mary's of the Isle, progressing, with the advent of the Vikings, to a second island and then, with the Normans, to a third. Later the inhabitants linked the Viking and Norman islands with a bridge and enclosed them with a high wall, forming the medieval city of Cork, perched just above the swamp, edged with a sheltered harbour and joined to the ocean by the River Lee. The city had become r