You have gone too far

A rural Irish community faces the return of a violent cult leader in O'Connor's chilling third outing for veterinarian Dimpna Wilde (after Some of Us Are Looking). Decades ago, the town of Dingle was terrorized by Cahal Mackey, who called himself the Shepherd and recruited young, pregnant women to his cult. Though one of Mackey's followers was discovered with her throat slit and her baby cut out of her womb, authorities couldn't link Mackey to her death, and instead arrested him on drug and weapons charges. Twenty-nine years later, Mackey is released from prison and tragedy strikes Dingle once again: one pregnant woman is found dead in a bog, and another is abducted while meeting with her unborn baby's adoptive parents. Dimpna gets involved when she learns that Mackey paid a recent visit to her veterinary clinic and may have targeted her decades ago. She offers to help Det. Insp. Cormac O'Brien and Det. Sgt. Barbara Neely track Mackey down and prove his guilt. O'Connor's gift for atmosphere elevates the well-oiled plot, resulting in the series' best entry yet. Agent: Evan Marshall, Evan Marshall Agency. (Nov.)

A bizarre message launches a murky threat to women in the Irish village of Dingle. It starts with an email. Someone who signs herself One Who Has Not Forgotten sends it to an unspecified number of pregnant young women telling them that the time has come for certain secrets to come to light. Recipients DeafGirlsRule@gmail.com and FiFoFum@gmail.com take the conversation to a chat, messaging each other about the strange warning and finally agreeing to a meetup at the Dingle Spring Festival. In the meantime, John Malone, whose neighbors describe him as "the nosy old goat next door," is old school enough to become fixated by the aforementioned neighbors' overflowing mailbox, left unattended while they're vacationing. When he takes the liberty of retrieving their mail, he finds a ransom note targeting their daughter, Fiona. While Malone is rushing to the Garda station to report the threat to Fiona, pregnant and deaf Shauna Mills arrives at the home of the couple she's chosen to adopt her out-of-wedlock child to find them bound and gagged by a masked man who holds up signs telling her, "YOU CAN COME QUIETLY / AND LIVE / OR YOU CAN STRUGGLE / AND DIE." Local veterinarian Dimpna Wilde, who ran into Shauna shortly before she disappeared, calls Detective Inspector Cormac O'Brien, but things quickly spiral out of control. More kidnappings, a body in the local bog, and flashbacks to 30 years earlier, when a shadowy cult leader called the Shepherd impregnated female followers and kept them captive in a compound called the Womb, all contribute to a chaotic narrative in which childbirth appears simultaneously as a crowning achievement and a deadly danger to women. Neither Cormac's determination to execute his job faithfully nor Dimpna's love for all creatures great and small can overcome the ick factor of the underlying puzzle. The title says it all. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.