The Vanishing Triangle: The Murdered Women Ireland Forgot

by Claire McGowan

Overview

From the bestselling author of What You Did comes a true-crime investigation that cast a dark shadow over the Ireland of her childhood.

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.

Through questioning 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 candid investigation into 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McGowan reveals an Ireland not of leprechauns and craic but of outdated social and sexual mores, where women and their bodies were of secondary importance to perceived propriety and misguided politics—a place of well-buttoned lips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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781542035293
Publisher:	Amazon Publishing
Publication date:	05/01/2022
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	682,926
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Claire McGowan was born in 1981 in a small Irish village where the most exciting thing that ever happened was some cows getting loose on the road. She is the author of The Fall, What You Did, The Other Wife, The Push, I Know You and the acclaimed Paula Maguire crime series. She also writes women’s fiction under the name Eva Woods.

Editorial Reviews

A chilling book of true crime featuring important social issue concerns.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Thought-provoking, compelling true crime.” —Library Journal

“McGowan writes for the justice of the lost and murdered women and for change in Ireland.” —Booklist

From the Publisher

04/23/2022

Crime novelist McGowan (What You Did) explores the unsolved disappearances of eight women within eight miles of Dublin, Ireland, during the 1990s in her first nonfiction book. McGowan, who grew up in Ireland at the time of these crimes, illuminates the stories of the women who disappeared, and how their cases were impacted by the political and social turmoil of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Was this the work of a serial killer or a tragic series of coincidences overshadowed by the Troubles? McGowan's perspective as a crime novelist and Irish native is unique. Throughout the book, she considers the narrative of safety in Ireland that was perpetuated in her youth. She also reconciles the coordinated resolutions of the crimes in her novels with the realistic complexities of criminal investigations. This book will appeal to fans of true crime and gender studies for McGowan's empathetic distillation of these crimes, insight into law enforcement in Ireland, and the culture of violence against women that was more pervasive than she realized. Readers interested in crime during the Troubles may also enjoy Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. VERDICT Thought-provoking, compelling true crime.—Kate Bellody

Library Journal

2022-02-25
A writer born in Northern Ireland examines the stories of women who disappeared without a trace in 1990s Ireland.

Between 1993 and 1998, eight women disappeared 80 miles outside Dublin in a “safe and welcoming country where bad things don’t really happen.” Exploring these disappearances, all of which took place during the author’s adolescence in Northern Ireland, McGowan recalls that no one ever discussed these missing person cases. She only stumbled upon them when she was doing research for her own crime fiction almost two decades later. In 2000, when a 24-year-old woman was found murdered near Dublin “in a populated area and in broad daylight,” McGowan felt compelled to investigate crimes that occurred years before. She discovered the women were a heterogenous group with no connection to each other. Yet those she talked to about them almost invariably asked if they were involved in sex work. “Think about what it means, that question—that we expect a certain type of woman to go missing, to be murdered,” she writes.” While police had worked on the cases for three years, the author discovered that in one case, it took them three days to start looking for the missing woman. She also learned that one woman who had barely escaped from a brutal rape and attempted murder in Dublin’s “vanishing triangle” saw her attacker, a husband and father others considered “a decent man,” released from prison five years before the end of his sentence. McGowan surmises that the “savagery and speed” of the ambush suggested a man who knew what he was doing. Yet he was never investigated further for possible connection to the eight disappearances. Readable and thought-provoking, this book reveals that despite efforts at modernization and liberalization, Irish systems of justice and power remain as patriarchal as they are complicit in maintaining a centuries-old culture of silence, suppression, and misogyny.

A chilling book of true crime featuring important social issue concerns.

Kirkus Reviews