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This brilliant book is my first encounter with this Irish author and it certainly won't be the last.

Storytelling is of an excellent quality, all done with a poetic prose, the dialogue between characters is very believable and absolute humanlike, while the atmosphere of Ireland in the 1950s is wonderfully pictured by the author, with all its hardship and misdemeanour.

Its a wonderful literary and historical Irish mystery, that is set in the Winter of 1957, with a self-confessing flashback by one of the main characters in 1947, with at the end set in 1967 a surprising revelation from the real perpetrator about the murder of Father Tom, and with the title "Snow" acting as metaphor for concealing and revealing certain actions.

The red thread, or common theme if you like, in this superb mystery is the child abuse, young girls and in this instance young boys, by clergymen, without real consideration the psychological effect this will have on these children, and all this abuse somehow condoned and covered up by the Irish Catholic Church, including at this time of history by Archbishop Dr John Charles McQuaid.

DI St John Strafford is called from Dublin, and arrives at Ballyglass House, county Wexford, to find the murdered corpse of the Catholic priest, Father Tom, and this same corpse is lying dead in the house of the Protestant aristocratic Osbourne family.

While investigating this case DI Strafford, assisted by DS Ambrose Jenkins, and much later on also by Wexford Garda Sergeant Radford, they will meet with many obstructions as to the why and how of this particular murder, and not only from the people at Ballyglass House and its close surroundings, but also from the powerful Archbishop McQuaid.

What is to follow is an intriguing and revealing Irish crime mystery, in which child abuse within the Irish Catholic Church will play a very important and sinister part, and in this environment the unsure but very willing DI Strafford must somehow find the killer of Father Tom, but in the meantime several other deaths will occur to boys/young men mainly due to shame of having been abused and this being concealed, while not getting the necessary help that they really need from the Catholic Church and Archbishop McQuaid, while also DS Jenkins will lose his life in their search for the revealing truth.

Highly recommended, for this is a magnificent Irish crime mystery with a clear and sound message, and that's why I like to call this great book: "A Marvellous Revealing Irish Crime Mystery"!