Hello!

Welcome to my new website/blog.  First off , I wish to say a huge thank you to the creative and gifted Colleen Sheehan for her work on this site and for giving it its professional gloss.  Anyone who would like support in starting up a new website, or have their Facebook or Twitter pages redesigned, their ebooks formatted or any one of a number of excellent services, click on this link.  You will not regret it.  write.DREAM.repeat Book Design

Wednesday 21 February 2024

 TWO MORE BRILLIANT NEW COVERS BY JUAN PADRON

Book 7 (The Fourth Victim) and 8 (Marked for Death) of the Inspector Sheehan Mysteries series are now ready for publication. My cover artist, Juan Padron, has again produced two fabulous covers. 

Blurb for The Fourth Victim

A child buried alive. Three lawyers are battered to death. A judge is murdered in his own home.

DCI Sheehan and his Serious Crimes Unit investigate the murders of three solicitors.  Revelations about the victim’s shady dealings offer Sheehan and his Serious Crimes Unit a large number of solid suspects.

Yet one suspect stands out above the others. Having suffered abominably at the hands of all three solicitors, it appears that a grieving mother has a powerful motive to kill all of them. Evidence piles up against her during the investigation and for many on the team there is no need to look further for the killer.  

But DCI Sheehan isn’t so sure. When a fourth victim is murdered, he is forced to look at the entire investigation with fresh eyes. Is the evidence against the key suspect as solid as it appears? Is some dark personage in the background pulling strings and manipulating events?

When Sheehan starts to look for the puppeteer, events escalate to an explosive climax.




Blurb for Book 8:  Marked for Death

A Knight of the Realm is murdered. High-level VIPs will attend the funeral. One of them is marked for death. 

Sir Theodore Hayes was a hard and unpopular businessman. There is no shortage of suspects for his murder. What Sheehan and his Serious Crimes Unit don’t know, however, is that the New IRA had a hand in Sir Theodore’s killing.

And that is only the first move in a terrorist plan that is set to ‘rock the British Isles.’

A three-time loser offers Sheehan information that the IRA is planning something huge on the day of Sir Theodore’s funeral. Distracted by two further, seemingly unconnected murders, having no clue about the nature of the threat or its location, Sheehan and his team spend frantic days vainly trying to uncover the plot.

On the morning of the funeral, and with the hours racing by, Sheehan’s brain is in turmoil. He still has no idea about what the New IRA has planned.

Can he glean enough from the myriad small clues rattling through his head in time to stop the terrorists?










 





Sunday 28 January 2024

 FANTASTIC NEW COVERS


I have come across a brilliant cover artist from Venezuela named Juan Padron.  His work is extraordinary and he can produce covers in just hours instead of days. He is not cheap but his work is worth every penny.

Below are three new covers ... two for books already published, and Conduit to Murder, to be published in a couple of months.






Wednesday 15 November 2023



NEWS

After almost a year and a half languishing  in a publisher's office, books 4 and 5 of The Inspector Sheehan Mysteries series are now available on Amazon with new titles and new covers.

Book 5: Murder of a Runaway


Cross The Shadow; become a Shade.

Lin Hui and Cheung Mingzhu from Shenzhen in China, win scholarships to study at Queen’s University in Belfast. Alina Balauru departs a poor farm in Romania for well paid work in Northern Ireland. Three lives harbouring long-cherished dreams. Three lives headed for tragedy.

Sheehan and his Serious Crimes Unit discover the body of one of the young  women in the garden of an upmarket residence. Confronted with violent Chinese racketeers, brutal human-traffickers and a fiendishly clever killer called The Shadow, they are baffled by a case that seems to lead in two entirely different directions. Can they find out who The Shadow is in time to save the other two victims?

 
The full five stars. This was truly one of the best books I've ever read. [Michelle Newman. Amazon (United States) Reviewer.]

An elaborate adrenaline maze to trap the reader. One of the best thrillers I have read in recent times.
[Vadana Garg, Online Book Club.]

Thought-provoking, emotional and gut-wrenching. An exceptional crime-thriller and a must-read for any thriller lover. [Eric Praschan, Author of Blind Evil and The Burden of Silence]

Murder of a Runaway is a perfect thriller, written by an amazing story-teller
. [Sushma Chowdary, Amazon (India) Reviewer.]

Brian O’Hare sheds a light on a grim reality with this perfectly executed thriller. The novel has unforgettable characters, heart-pounding pacing, and an unpredictable plot while keeping a balance between sensitivity and reality. [Lunastella, Online Book Club]




 

 

 


  

 Book 4: Murder on the Dark Web

 I am Nemein. I am not a murderer. I am emotionally detached from my killings. I am, therefore, an instrument of Nemesis, a punisher.

 This is a theme running through a number of blogs on the Dark Web, written by a serial killer. He is highly intelligent and employs philosophical argument to justify a series of gruesome murders. However, he describes the killings with such gloating relish that he  reveals himself to be a coldblooded, narcissistic psychopath.

Sheehan and his team rush headlong down a series of blind alleys in the pursuit of the psychopath. He is fiendishly clever, utterly ruthless, and tests Sheehan’s famed intuition to the limit. Indeed, Sheehan only learns the truth during a horrific climax when some members of his team experience a most harrowing ‘laceration of the soul’ that they will never be able to forget. It is unlikely that the reader will either.

 Murder on the Dark Web has received the Top Medal Honours Award from the New Apple Awards for Excellence.

“O’Hare has developed his characters very successfully as they have tackled their various cases. I, for one, am eagerly awaiting their next challenge in what is a crime series which undoubtedly deserves a much wider audience.” A.P. Martin, Author of Codename Lazarus and Spytrap.

“I’m not surprised by the accolades and the praise bestowed on this novel. There are weird murders, a clever and truly twisted murderer, bizarre clues and possible motives, plenty of red herrings, twists and turns galore and a fascinating background to the story. Another gripping book by Brian O’Hare. I am eagerly awaiting the next one.” Olga Núñez Miret, Writer. Ph.D. (American Literature). MSc (Criminology)




Sunday 3 April 2022



LITERARY TITAN AWARDS



Our highest award, The Literary Titan Gold Award, is bestowed on books

that we found to be perfect in their delivery of original content, utilizing

fresh themes to convey innovative ideas, and deftly uses elegant prose

to transform words into expertly written literature. The Doom Murders

by Brian O’Hare scores highly on all points. It also gains a well-deserved

five gold stars from one of our key reviewers.






 
See our interview with the author about his book on this link:


Saturday 19 February 2022



FALLEN MEN by Brian O’Hare

Reviewed by G.J. Griffiths


It was amazing: Five Stars

I will admit to feelings of dismay and reluctance when I first began to read this book. The acknowledgements and the prologue indicated that it was to be about a young Catholic priest in Ireland. While I always attempt to remain neutral and objective in my reviews of books, I find that also being honest will often lend itself to accumulate too much cynicism when I’m reading books about religion, particularly books containing too much religiosity. Thankfully, Brian O’Hare’s novel was gripping from the first few pages and so well written, with balance and tactful insight, that I was able to retain my respect for another person’s religious beliefs while entering the curious world of Irish Catholicism.

Fallen Men is an excellent novel about the fragility and emotions of real people. It is a story about a priest, Ray Canavan, who makes a serious mistake when he becomes involved with Maria, a young student from a local girls’ school. She reminds him strongly about Karen, the woman he could have married had he not become devoted to God and the Church. There is much in Ray’s past life to discover and explain about his intense feelings of guilt, his vulnerability as a sensitive human being, and his apparent human frailty at a deeply emotional time in his life.

The reader is easily swayed between condemning Ray one moment, as the responsible adult, and the next sympathising with his inner child, with heart-felt sadness. There are several serious issues discussed and considered in the novel, such as abuse, abortion, and faith, notwithstanding the intricacies of certain aspects of Irish Law. We are present during several court scenes and witness various conflicts between an individual’s duty to God, the Church and one’s humanity. Each of these concepts is handled so well by the author, within such beautiful dialogue and description that I was often left in awe, so full of admiration was I for the writing on the pages before me. Ray’s close friends, Dan and Tony, as well as Maria and Mrs Toner, the housekeeper are all characters well-drawn and easily identifiable.

I would never, ever, have thought beforehand that a book tackling the religious issues in this novel could make me stick with it so intensely. It is a page-turner in the highest sense of the word and for me rates alongside books by Orwell, Dickens, Angelou, Steinbeck and Harper Lee etc. Highly recommended