It's Ireland in the 19th century so everything is horrible, and if it isn't horrible just now, something horrible will be along in a moment. Here we go: five members of the same family murdered brutally in one terrible night. What follows is a tortuous and tortured tale of malice and revenge and injustice and judicial murder that rocks the country, echoing all the way to the Houses of Parliament for two tempestuous debates. Men are hung, men are imprisoned. Some are guilty, some are most assuredly not, and someone most assuredly got away with it. Most haunting and poignant of all, to me, is the sketchy fate of the surviving boys, thrust into the tender mercies of the orphanages and industrial schools and largely, though not completely, vanished from history.

A solid piece of historical non-fiction that works hard to be fair and even-handed about a notorious and ugly story, even as it struggles in vain to fully understand the causes and motivations.