A Jig Before Dying

By Danny Carnahan

Writer and musician Danny Carnahan lives in Albany, California with his wife Saundra. His published writing includes Irish Songs For Guitar (2004, Hal Leonard) and true stories for Travelers' Tales.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 143630833X
• ISBN13: 9781436308335
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: Xlibris
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Irish secrets and sins...both political and personal

It is 1992 and Niall Sweeney is a satisfied man. He's got a good day job in San Francisco as an engineer (one that recently took him to Dublin for two years on a job working for the Anglo-Irish Bank), a beautiful, intelligent wife, Rose, and a second career as an Irish fiddler (he has just released his first CD to moderate success), playing regular sessions at a Richmond District pub called the Bag of Nails. His world is turned upside down, however, when he is attacked by a music critic, first in print in a scathing review of his CD, then literally in the pub, when the reviewer, a recent transplant from Ireland named Michael Blayney, comes after him with a string of seemingly incoherent curses and a knife. When Blayney turns up murdered later that night, Sweeney is, of course, the prime suspect. Things begin to look really grim when the police link him to a banking scam involving the IRA and he is promptly fired from his job. Convinced that one or more of the pub musicians must know more than he, or she, is telling--and also convinced that this is the only way he is going to stay out of jail--Sweeney starts an investigation of his own. Meanwhile, Rose, who is a literature professor at San Francisco State University, recognizes a similarity between Blayney's ravings and a thousand-year old Irish poem, The Legend of Mad Sweeney, and begins her own investigation. With the help of one of Sweeney's friends in Ireland, they begin to uncover the secrets and sins of the past--both political and personal--and are faced with the terrible task of giving the police a plausible solution to the mystery that is both just and completely false. First-time novelist Carnahan, like Sweeney, is himself an Irish fiddler and has done a masterful job of setting a first-rate mystery in San Francisco's Irish music scene. Tightly plotted with authentic, believable dialogue.

A detective couple linked to SF's Irish music scene

A Jig Before Dying, murder mystery, weaves together many strands: -- a fiddler and his English-professor wife, an amateur detective couple reminiscent of Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles -- Irish traditional music and musicians, especially as seen in pub "sessions" -- the Northern Irish rebellion, both there and in San Francisco -- the S.F. State University community The protagonist couple, along with their friends, keep the mood light-hearted while they sort out the hidden connections among the denizens of a S.F. Irish pub where we watch a music session in progress. This is the first of a series of "Sweeney and Rose" mysteries that I intend to follow as it develops. The author himself is an excellent, established musician and composer.