Murphy’s Law: A Molly Murphy Mystery by Rhys Bowen

My version of shopping therapy is to raid the library.  It doesn’t cost anything, and it’s very easy to return a book or movie if I don’t like it.  So, sometimes, I wander the library and check out anything that seems interesting.  One time I did that with just the mystery section.  I ended up with a lot of different series to try, including the Molly Murphy mysteries.  Of course, as what usually happens, the book I picked up was far down in the series.  I had to reserve the first one to see where the story began.  What I got was a really good book that I did not want to put down.

                Molly Murphy has killed someone.  She didn’t do it on purpose.  It was clearly an act of self-defense.  The man was forcing himself on her and she did what she had to do to escape.  Unfortunately, the man Molly killed has status in her Irish village.  Why and how she killed the man will not matter.  Despite the man’s actions, Molly will be seen as the guilty party.  Her only choice is to go on the run.

                This run takes Molly to a ship heading to America.  Not under her own name, though, and not just because the police are after her.  Molly will be traveling under the name of Kathleen O’Connor, a woman too sick to travel to America herself.  Still wanting her children to be taken to their father in New York, the real Kathleen asks Molly to take her place on the ship.  All she has to do is pretend to be the children’s mother and get them to their father safely once the ship has landed.  Molly agrees to this ruse, even though it is full of risk with how young these children are.  Very easily either Bridie or Seamus could let it slip that Molly is not their real mother.

                Surprisingly, having her identity reveled by the children ends up not being a problem.  It is a concern with someone else, though.  O’Malley is the bully of the steerage class passengers and no one wants to deal with him.  He propositions Molly, only to be met with a slap.  Instead of this refusal deterring O’Malley, he sets his sights on Molly even more.

                O’Malley has spent time in the real Kathleen O’Connor’s hometown, and he knows Molly isn’t her.  Wanting his revenge, O’Malley corners Molly before she and the children are able to disembark the ship.  He tries to blackmail Molly about her identity, but once again she refuses to go along with what he is trying to do.  Molly is able to escape his presence on the ship.  It is what he may do to her once they’re on land that concerns her.

                Very quickly that concern is taken care of.  While stuck on Ellis Island, someone kills O’Malley, and Molly thinks she may know of a witness to the crime.  It is a guard who threatened Molly when she was out of bed looking for Bridie.  Unfortunately, the only guard with the description Molly gives wasn’t on duty at the time, bringing her credibility into question.  Then, to make matters worse, Michael, a friend Molly made on the ship, becomes the main suspect.  Distressed that her friend is in jail, Molly vows to help Michael in any way she can.

                It will definitely not be easy to help Michael.  Molly is in an unfamiliar city and country, after all.  She also must look for a job at the same time.  With both tasks at hand, Molly encounters a lot of seedy people, ones she would really rather not do business with.  The situation does not get helped when Molly finds another man dead, making her the enemy of the neighborhood where the man lived.           

                Looking out for Molly, yet also constantly questioning her, is Captain Daniel Sullivan.  A member of the New York City Police, Captain Sullivan is looking into O’Malley’s murder.  He questions Molly with the suspicion that she is hiding something, which she is.  It’s just not what Captain Sullivan would think.  He does not suspect that the woman in front of him is going under an assumed name.  Even though Molly is in America, she is still going by the name Kathleen O’Connor.  It is an identity she must keep in case the Irish police have somehow sent word about her to America.  If anyone finds out the truth about who Molly is, it could mean the end if her freedom forever.

                Since this book isn’t very long, and something happens practically on every page, this book was very hard to put down.  Not that everything was easy to read, though.  The conditions Molly and the children lived through in steerage were absolutely horrible.  It made me think of people on the lower decks of the Titanic and what they must have experienced.  Even though this book was set a decade before that, the conditions may not have been all that much different.           

                Something else horrifying was the delays and treatment Molly went through on Ellis Island.  The threats about sending her back over the slightest little thing was especially awful.  We never hear about these types of things when people tell stories about Ellis island.  I know this is a book of fiction, but it makes me wonder if people experienced similar situations in real life.

                Fortunately for Molly, once she did get on land, Seamus, Bridie and Seamus’s father, was very kind, even though his cousin was not.  So, with Seamus’s kindness, and Captain Sullivan’s interest in her, I am curious to see where these relationships Molly has are going to go in the future.  Still trying to get her footing in a new country, there are so many directions they could go.