"The Reverend Mother is delighted with her new entrant to the convent. Young Sister Gertrude is well-educated, has worked for an accountant and has an appealing sense of humour. But one autumn morning, Sister Gertrude is found dead inside a small wooden shed, just beside the river. Surely a young nun could not die from alcohol poisoning? But when the Reverend Mother delves more deeply into Sister Gertrude's background, she finds some puzzling anomalies....

"Despite its regal name, the Queen's Old Castle is nothing but a low-grade department store, housed within the decrepit walls of what was once a medieval castle, built at the harbour entrance to Cork city. On her first visit for fifty years, the Reverend Mother is struck by how little has changed - apart, that is, from the strange smell of gas ... But when the store's owner staggers from his office and topples over the railings to his death, Mother...

In sixteenth-century western Ireland, Brehon judge Mara attends the funeral of a priest from the Burren, only to discover the dead body of a local silversmith, Sorley, a greedy and distrusted man who was stung to death by bees.