A hardboiled detective novel set in contemporary Ireland, a gripping journey taking the reader from Dublin to, in no particular order, Belfast, Kilkenny, County Meath, Cork, Galway, Derry and all other places in between.

Carrying a box containing her husband’s severed hand , a traveller woman implores private eye Shamus to find her beloved – or what’s left of him. For no sooner does Shamus take the case than, north of the border, he comes across another box – and another hand. A pair of legs then turns up. Followed by a head.

What’s the connection between the hand in the South and the hand in the North? And who’s missing all these body parts?

This book has it all: detectives who couldn’t be arsed, Gardaí who could, for the right price (maybe), the Russian mafia, hurlers on the ditch, barmaids wise beyond their years, a labyrinthine plot – a wry affectionate view of twenty-first-century Ireland beyond the Pale. Truly a fitting Gaelic homage to the works of Hammett and Chandler