Death in Irish Accents


 
 
 
 
 Table of Contents
 
 Also by
 Title Page
 
 Copyright Page
 Pronunciation Guide
 CHAPTER 1
 CHAPTER 2
 CHAPTER 3
 CHAPTER 4
 CHAPTER 5
 CHAPTER 6
 CHAPTER 7
 CHAPTER 8
 CHAPTER 9
 CHAPTER 10
 CHAPTER 11
 CHAPTER 12
 CHAPTER 13
 CHAPTER 14
 CHAPTER 15
 CHAPTER 16
 CHAPTER 17
 CHAPTER 18
 CHAPTER 19
 CHAPTER 20
 CHAPTER 21
 Teaser chapter
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 
 
 
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
 I have so many complex feelings about writing this author’s note. 
 
 Accents, the beloved cafe at which this book is set, is real. Or was, pre-pandemic; they closed permanently in mid-2020, and I’ve missed them constantly since. I’d always intended to set the fourth Dublin Driver book there, though, and I decided I was going to ANYWAY, despite the vagaries of the real world, so this book is as much a memorial as an homage to a place I spent so very, very many hours working. The staff there very kindly lent me their names, so everyone who works at the fictional Accents worked at the real one. 
 
 The writer’s group is loosely based on my own group, whose goal is always “get together and make sure we’re getting some writing done,” although to the best of my knowledge, none of us have killed anybody (in Accents or anywhere else). My eternal thanks are due to Stephanie Burgis, Juliet McKenna, and Adrian Tchaikovsky, who also all lent me their names, and who are all actual novelists whose books you should check out. (They are not, however, the people in my writing group! Or, I suspect, murderers.) 
 
 I owe a great debt of gratitude to Twitter users _mawhrin, muczachan, and blotosmetek who helped me with Jelena’s bits of interspersed Polish, and indeed to my infinitely patient writer’s group, Sarah, Susan, and Ruth, who still put up with a lot of me going “Okay but is this a proper Irish way to say that” about many, many things. 
 
 Beyond that, my thanks and adoration are always due to my family, who make sure I get time to write and are generally altogether lovely people. <3 
 
 -Catie
 
 
 The Dublin Driver Mysteries by Catie Murphy 
 
 
 DEAD IN DUBLIN 
 
 DEATH ON THE GREEN 
 
 DEATH OF AN IRISH MUMMY 
 
 DEATH IN IRISH ACCENTS 
 
 
 CHAPTER 1 
 A body fell out of the closet when the barista opened it. 
 The barista screamed, throwing herself backward, and landed in a sprawl across Megan Malone’s lap. Coffee went everywhere. Megan, too startled to even yell, grabbed the barista to make sure she didn’t bounce to the floor the way the— 
 The way the body had done. Megan said, “Oh god,” under her breath. Immediately beside her, her girlfriend made a hideous, high-pitched squeak that was almost worse than the barista’s screams. Like Megan, Jelena had grabbed the barista—Anie—but Megan had taken most of the girl’s weight. Jelena scrambled backward, right over the arm of their couch, as the body dropped into the couch directly beneath the closet, then bounced off and hit the coffee table with a truly horrible crunch. Then it . . . slithered . . . to the floor, limbs flopping around with a stomach-turning looseness. 
 Either it was very fresh, Megan thought with a sort of clinically investigative detachment, or it was . . . not fresh at all. 
 Anie, the barista, was still shrieking. Jelena had landed hard on the floor and crouched there, hands clenched against her mouth to stop her own screams. Everyone else in the café was coming to see what had happened, people climbing on the wide arms of the café’s couches and pounding up the stairs from the lower floor. Alarmed faces started appearing at the top of the stairs, stacked one above another like a comedy sketch as they peered around at the nook-like space at the back of the café where Megan, Jelena, Anie and the dead girl were. The dead girl had fallen—well, landed—between two of the deep couches and the square coffee table at right angles to them. 
 Jelena, through the fists knotted at her mouth, whispered, “This is not possible,” and part of Megan had to agree. This was her fourth body in the past three years. That sort of thing had been within the bounds of reason when she was in the military, working as a combat medic and driving ambulances, but it was not what anybody expected as a limo driver in Dublin. 
 The other part of her thought they’d better clear the room before anybody started taking pictures, although it was almost certainly too late for that. She got Anie off her lap and stood, raising her voice. “Max? Can you get everybody out of here, please?” Her Texan accent sounded particularly noticeable to her right then, but it usually did when she felt she had to be pushy about something. An American accent worked wonders for being pushy in Ireland. 
 Another of the baristas, a good-looking young white man, stuttered, “I—yes, okay, yes—” and began to herd patrons out of the café. A third barista went downstairs and Megan could hear him calling, “Sorry, lads, Accents has to close for a while. If you’re waiting on your drinks, we’ll refund your money at the till.” 
 Somebody downstairs said, “What happened,” and the barista, Liam, said, “There’s been an accident,” in a grim tone. After a few seconds, the lingering patrons from downstairs began to exit, craning their necks to see what was going on in the little alcove. One of them said, “Oh, shit,” and scurried out with their phone already at their ear. 
 Jelena wrapped her hand around Megan’s upper arm. “Megan, we have to go.” 
 “I can’t.” Megan gave Jelena an apologetic glance, seeing the anger and worry in the other woman’s brilliant blue eyes. “Honestly,