Hard Cases – True Stories of Irish Crime

From crime to verdict, award-winning journalist Gene Kerrigan tells the brutal stories of some of Ireland's most notorious murders, kidnappings and violent attacks

Hard Cases is a collection of startling stories about the reality of crime and court cases in Ireland. In these stories, there are no crime bosses with quaint nicknames; the police don't collect convenient clues that tell them whodunnit. Instead, it contains cases both famous and obscure in which the outcome is sometimes just, sometimes unsettling and always complicated, in which there are no easy answers and no simple victims.

In Hard Cases, you will delve into the criminal underworld of Ireland, starting with the tale of Dessie O'Hare which records in breathtaking detail the inside story of a notorious kidnapping.

There's the story of Karl Crawley, a sometimes gentle, sometimes wild young Dublin man who found a shocking way of fighting back against authority.

Then there's the story of Peter Matthews, who went into a police station to answer questions about a petty crime and ended up dead – with gardaí covering up the reason why.

Hard Cases also exposes the story behind some Ireland's most infamous crime scenes: how did Fr Molloy come to die in the bedroom of his married friends? What happened when Christy Payne came home to find his daughter's boyfriend wielding a hatchet?

Hard Cases is a must-read – revealing the true stories behind some of Ireland's most famous headlines and exposing the machinations of the Irish justice system, it is a shocking and fascinating snapshot of Irish crime, criminals and court cases.