THE IRISH ASSASSINS
CONSPIRACY, REVENGE AND THE MURDERS THAT STUNNED AN EMPIRE
JULIE KAVANAGH
Grove Press, 473pp, £18.99
Julie Kavanagh, once a ballerina, then a Vanity Fair writer who specialised in dance, inherited her journalist-father’s abiding interest in the 1882 murders of Lord Frederick Cavendish, Chief Secretary of Ireland, and Thomas Burke, his Under-secretary, in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. They were brutally hacked to death with surgical knives by radical Irish Republicans known as the Invincibles. Her father, who died at the age of 52, bequeathed her his voluminous research.
The story has ‘an ending worthy of a Victorian melodrama’
‘Her approach is intelligent and innovative,’ wrote Mary Kenny in the Literary Review. ‘She reports the double murder as a terrible event in itself, while also setting it within the wider context of Irish history, switching imaginatively from place to place and period to period... It is a long, complex story, involving history, politics, social circumstances and numerous personalities.’ It also has ‘an ending worthy of a Victorian melodrama’. Kavanagh’s account reminded
Times reviewer Gerard Degroot ‘of the very best of true crime, the sort that Dominick Dunne used to write for Vanity Fair. Like Dunne, Kavanagh never hurries; she takes the time to describe characters and places with exquisite detail. An engaging story is rendered beautiful because of the tiny ephemera that a less sensitive author might have carelessly discarded.’ The reviewer for the Sunday
Business Post (Ireland), Andrew Lynch, said it ‘has the plot and intrigue of a sweeping 19th-century novel… The Irish Assassins is a colourful, ambitious book that sometimes spreads its sprawling narrative too thinly – but still makes most other accounts of the period seem bloodless by comparison; while Tim Bielenberg in the Sunday
Independent (Ireland) said it ‘is one of the best researched and most enjoyable historical reads I have come across in quite some time’.