Death at Whitewater Church, by Andrea Carter.

Death at Whitewater Church: An Inishowen Mystery, by Andrea Carter. Florida: Oceanview Publishing, 2018.

4 stars

An interesting  mystery set on the northern coast of Ireland.

Andrea Carter earned her law degree in Dublin, and returned there to practice law.  Like her main character, Andrea Carter has lived and worked for a time as a solicitor on the Inishowen Peninsula, Co Donegal.   Death at Whitewater Church is the first of her series featuring the Irish coastland.  Others in the series are Treacherous Strand and The Well of Ice.

Benedicta O’Keeffe, known as Ben, is the central character in the Inishowen mysteries. A personable individual, she carries her own painful past that sometimes intrude on her life.  As a rural lawyer she is involved with several families in the fictitious coastal village of Glendara.  When a body is found in a deserted church that is up sale, she happens to be present.  The whole village tries to help solve the questions about the identity of the body and the circumstances of his death. A web of interesting characters creates a complex web of speculation.  The moving accounts of the rugged Irish landscape grace the book.

Carter describes the origin of her writing  as a way “of saying the things I wanted to say but couldn’t, of behaving in a way I wanted to but couldn’t.” She claims that Ben O’Keefe was originally a braver and more reckless version of herself.  As she wrote, however, she gained some distance on both the character and place, and they began to develop on their own.  The result was first one novel and now a series set in Donegal.

I recommend the Whitewater Church to those who enjoy mysteries that focus on place and people, and I look forward to finding the other volumes of Carter’s series.