The Irish assassins Conspiracy, revenge, and the Phoenix Park murders that stunned Victorian England

On May 6, 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, chief secretary and the undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed in Dublin's Phoenix Park and stabbed to death. As Kavanagh (The Girl Who Loved Camellias, 2013) chronicles in this riveting account, the murders were only one part of a much longer story--that of Irish independence from England. To provide context for the titular murders, Kavanagh delves deeply into British rule in Ireland, which started with the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169. After sketching out the timeline, Kavanagh fully immerses readers into mid and late 1800s Ireland, providing rich historical details about day-to-day life and tracking the rising political tensions between poverty-stricken Irish tenants and despotic English landlords. Before the murders, there was movement from both parties towards peace and Irish independence, and the devastating fallout of the crimes is still resonant today. This entertaining and informative narrative is populated by colorful characters on both sides of the conflict, all of whom are brought to vivid life by Kavanagh's stellar writing and through firsthand correspondence included throughout the text.

Journalist Kavanagh (Nureyev: The Life) delivers a page-turning history of the murders of the chief secretary and the undersecretary for Ireland in May 1882. Examining the events that led up to the assassination, Kavanagh details the destitution of Ireland's tenant farmers, who had few rights of tenure or rent security against their Anglo-Irish landlords, and the rise of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which aimed to overthrow British rule by armed insurrection. She vividly describes how the murders were plotted and carried out by the Invincibles, an extremist group within the Brotherhood, with funding from American supporters of Irish independence, and shows how the resulting backlash delayed home rule for Ireland by more than 30 years. The large cast includes Queen Victoria; prime minister William Gladstone; revolutionary Catholic priest James MacFadden, who sided with the tenant farmers, instructing them not to pay rent until landlords had given back "confiscated" acres; police superintendent John Mallon, "the Irish Sherlock Holmes," who caught the culprits; James Carey, a leader of the Invincibles turned informer; and Irish emigrant Patrick O'Donnell, who killed Carey for his betrayal. This entertaining and richly detailed chronicle offers fresh insights into a conflict whose repercussions are still felt today. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit. (Aug.)

The murders of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Henry Burke in 1882 brought global attention to long-standing Anglo-Irish tensions. The Cavendish and Burke assassinations were largely financed by Irish Americans, and were carried out by the self-styled Invincibles, a loosely organized radical splinter cell intent on assassinating British government officials in Ireland. Carrying on and expanding the work begun by her journalist father, author Kavanagh (Nureyev: The Life) has constructed a riveting tale that is both deeply researched and unforgettable. The sensational events leading up to and following the trials and executions of those directly involved in the assassinations sharply brought into focus a long history of bloodshed, oppression, and injustice that also touched many of the Victorian era's political notables, including Queen Victoria, prime minister William Gladstone, and Irish nationalist Charles Parnell. As the book's action shifts from Ireland to England, then to North America and South Africa, it skillfully tells a complex story of ambition, conspiracy, betrayal, and coercion that was centuries in the making, with implications that reach to the 21st century. VERDICT Expertly blending history and true crime, this is an essential read for anyone wanting to understand modern Irish history. Kavanagh's writing is engaging from start to finish.--Linda Frederiksen, formerly with Washington State Univ. Lib., Vancouver

A historical true-crime tale revisits three notorious Victorian-era murders that shocked Britain and dealt a body blow to the cause of Home Rule for Ireland. In painstaking and sometimes-harrowing detail, journalist Kavanagh examines the fatal 1882 stabbings of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Britain's Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, in Phoenix Park in Dublin. Five men--all with ties to the American-funded terrorist group known as the Invincibles--were tried and hanged for the crimes. A sixth, who had turned queen's evidence, was instead put on a ship to South Africa, giving rise to an Agatha Christie--esque twist involving disguises, fake identities, and a shipboard murder that caused Queen Victoria to write in her journal: "Well-deserved, but shocking!" The attacks were a fateful setback for a secret "truce" being pursued by Prime Minister William Gladstone and Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell, whose mistress and her husband acted as go-betweens. The author sets the stage for the tumult by casting the Donegal town of Gweedore as a microcosm of an Ireland in which, decades after the Great Famine, horrific poverty still prompted desperate responses to the barbarous evictions and other abuses of " 'landlordism,' an entirely pejorative word implying abuse of authority, from rack-renting to mercilessly arbitrary evictions." To depict broader crises, Kavanagh uses "the shifting episodic structure of today's television dramas," or quick cuts from country to country and character to character, which makes it hard to follow the sprawling plot and cast. Yet Kavanagh's keen sense of Ireland's pain--and the damage England inflicted on itself with its handling of it--ultimately justifies her conclusion, which approvingly quotes Roy Jenkins' Gladstone: "What vast benefit would have followed from an Irish settlement in the 1880s, thirty years before the Easter Rising." A cinematic, multilayered revenge tragedy centered on Ireland's fraught quest for independence. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.