Erin Go Bragh: 6 Mysteries and Thrillers by Irish and Irish American Women

Nothing quite like unsolved disappearances to get your heart racing. Told from several points of view, The Trap explores the lives impacted by the missing women.

Lucy decides she has to try to find her sister Nicki who went missing one year ago. Two women in the Irish Police Force, An Garda Síochána, team up when a clue might shed light on the missing women.

The final point of view is the abductor who tells the story of the disappearances to a fourth woman in the backseat of the car.

Can Lucy find the truth without getting herself killed? Will Angela, one of the members of the Garda, be able to catch the culprit? 

Tana French is sometimes called the queen of Irish crime fiction. Though she may be American-born, she deserves it.

The Searcher is the first in a new series focusing on retired Chicago police detective Cal Hooper in a small remote Irish village. He hopes to find a place where he can settle down and relax.

But his reputation proceeds when a young boy asks for help to find his missing brother. The boy and his family have reputations in the village.

But Cal decides to take on the case but without his usual police resources and networks. He’ll have to use his detective skills to find out what is at the bottom of it all.

The second book in the Cal Hooper series The Hunter came out last year.

It’s the first in the Reverend Mother Mystery series with the tenth and most recent published in 2023. In 1923, Cork was a bad year for flooding.

Reverend Mother Aquinas may live in the spiritual realm, teaching an order of nuns, but she knows something is wrong when she finds a fancifully dressed woman’s body in a flood grate outside her convent.

In the dead woman's bag, there is a ticket for a ball the prior night. Mother Aquinas decides that something must be done.

She convinces her former pupil, Police Sergeant Patrick Cashman to find out why the young woman was murdered.

It’s a debut psychological thriller for Jennifer Wilson O’Raghallaigh, who is a clinical psychologist herself. Study abroad is supposed to be fun and challenging but Jonah might be seeing more of the challenge than the fun.

Somehow, he’s stuck in psychology class instead of engineering and he works with a strange therapist. He’s trying to deal with his own skeletons, much less anyone else’s.

But something feels off for Jonah, but he’s not sure what. Something does not sit right about the therapy and the world around him. And then, someone dies.

Was it something Jonah himself put into action? Is he at risk?  Or will the police put him in jail for a crime he didn’t commit?

In this cozy mystery series, many things can happen when driving people around for a living but it’s better than anything Megan Malone saw in the military.

She enjoys her new life in Dublin working for the Leprechaun Limo Service until one of her frequent clients and well-known food critic, Elizabeth Darr dies at the foot of the famous statue of Molly Malone and her “Cockles and mussels.”

The culprit? Supposedly spoiled seafood. But Megan knows the owner and thinks that there is something that stinks to high heaven that isn’t fish.

So, Megan decides she has to get to the bottom of this crime to save her friend’s restaurant and reputation as well as take care of two Jack Russell puppies.

The sixth book Death of an Irish Druid came out in January 2025.

This is the mystery series that inspired this list! I love these cozy novels that take place in an Irish village.

Siobhán O’Sullivan is trying to keep the family together after the tragic accident of her parents in a car accident. She and her five siblings are trying to keep the family business, Naomi’s Bistro, going.

But that’s hard when a man is found dead inside the restaurant in the morning with scissors stuck in him. No one knows how he got into the restaurant in the first place, much less got murdered, but the local garda thinks that someone in the O’Sullivan family is at fault.

So Siobhán is going to have to take the lead on finding the real culprit.

The eleventh book (along with some novellas) Murder in an Irish Garden came out in February 2025.

Carlene O’Connor also has another series set in Ireland, though not a cozy one, starting with the first book No Strangers Here.