May 2022
ISBN:9781542035293
About:
Ireland in the 1990s seemed a safe place for women. With the news dominated by the Troubles, it was easy to ignore non-political murders and sexual violence, to trust that you weren’t going to be dragged into the shadows and killed. But beneath the surface, a far darker reality had taken hold.
In this candid investigation into the society and circumstances that allowed eight young women to vanish without a trace—no conclusion or conviction, no resolution for their loved ones—bestselling crime novelist Claire McGowan delivers a righteous polemic against the culture of secrecy, victim-blaming and shame that left these women’s bodies unfound, their fates unknown, their assailants unpunished.
McGowan reveals an Ireland not of leprechauns and craic but of outdated social and sexual mores, where women and their bodies were of secondary importance to perceived propriety and misguided politics—a place of well-buttoned lips and stony silence, inadequate police and paramilitary threat.
Was an unknown serial killer at large or was there something even more insidious at work? In this insightful, sensitively drawn account, McGowan exposes a system that failed these eight women—and continues to fail women to this day.
Review:
Thank you to Netgalley for affording me the privilege of reading this book by Claire McGowan.
To me there’s a fine line between fiction and nonfiction when it comes to murder. An author researches in depth giving the reader a lot of detail but usually with a successful outcome.
However I’m not a reader of true crime, preferring to leave some of the reality behind and walk into the world of make believe.
So picking up the varnishing triangle and after reading the prologue I was shocked to learn of the number of females who had gone missing in Ireland. The prologue alone was sadly gripping.
Myself, as a girl growing up in England during this era I had no idea of the events unfolding across the water at our neighbours. We only heard about the troubles occurring in Northern Ireland. It may be that these disappearances and murders were actually broadcast in the British media but I was a schoolgirl so I probably wasn’t paying much attention to the news in those days.
Growing up in 70s England we felt safe, we gave people who pulled up in cars, directions, got into friends parents cars without a second thought went out alone and thought nothing of walking home from school or shops at night via the alleyways and side streets. I knew my home turf well so I never considered it being anything other than safe. Mobile phones didn’t exist so some of the time our parents had no idea where we were. We came home when we knew it was tea time.
When I started working in the 80s I had to walk home not being able to drive. I remember hearing that the Yorkshire ripper was at large and even though I wasn’t in Yorkshire or the from the profession he targeted I vividly remember it still put me on high alert.
I still struggle with real crime stories because stories are meant to be fiction aren’t they! The vanishing triangle feels like a book of fiction, like it’s all made up, it’s really quite scary to think this actually happened and fiction is exactly what it isn’t.
Claire writes with passion and you move through the chapters with speed, with every turn it seems more and more unreal that it really is real. The attention to detail from Claire’s research is mind blowing, getting your brain around the fact that there were so few clues and that no one seem to find a pattern. That the rest of the world did not know about this and the lack of importance of information out there that all females needed to be vigilant. It’s has mind blowing as it is disbelieving. Thank you Claire for giving these women recognition and for bringing to our attention the horrifying events that occurred.
